


Road

by apparitionism



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-03-12 20:51:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 28,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13555347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparitionism/pseuds/apparitionism
Summary: Navigation’s difficult, even if you think you know where you do and don’t want to go. This is a story in which two people named Myka and Helena try to figure out how to get from one place to another.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes you choose what to write about; sometimes it chooses you. Last year, _Sports Illustrated_ ran a fascinating article by Susanna Schrobsdorff about the Rallye Aïcha des Gazelles du Maroc, an all-female, off-road rally that’s held annually in the Moroccan desert. Women compete in teams of two, driving 4x4s, trucks, crossovers, quad bikes, or motorbikes. It’s not about speed: they have to get from checkpoint to checkpoint using only a map and a compass, and the winners are those who travel the fewest kilometers—that is, those who navigate best. So I was thinking about why someone might want to do this… and then I noticed that Schrobsdorff had written that the mechanics who travel along as part of the rally’s huge retinue of support personnel are all men. And I thought, _Well, this certainly won’t do._ My disclaimer here is that I did a lot of reading about the rally, but I’m sure I’ve got tons of details wrong. Also my French is about as bad as my other non-English languages. Anyway, this piece is proceeding kind of like Pilot, in that something seems to want to be said, but I’m not quite managing to say it.

Myka drinks from her late-afternoon-lukewarm water bottle and wishes she were asleep. Being the only woman among a fraternity of men who think they know more than she does is always exhausting. Being the only woman on a forty-person team of mechanics that’s supporting a nine-day, all-woman off-road rally in the Moroccan desert? There’s probably a word for how much heavier that is, but Myka doesn’t know it. It’s only three days in, and she’s slipping into a very familiar trough of wondering why she ever said she’d do this again, the parched back of her mind cursing the name of the Army buddy who first got her this gig six years ago.

Every year, when the inquiry about her services arrives, Myka asks herself if she should go. The fact is, every year they do want mechanics who’ve done it before, particularly given how many women decide, each year, to try the event for the first time. The participants all get off-road training; they get basic mechanical instruction. But so many of them really have no idea what they’re doing, and they do need the help of someone who’s had more than her share of experience dealing with vehicles trying to drive at speed through sand. Plus there’s the fact of Myka being a woman. The organizers seem to think that her presence keeps the men in check in some way. That’s a nice story.

Every year, for five years now, when she’s asked herself “should I go again?”, she hasn’t had a reason not to. Nothing changes, so she should go. She packs her bag, grabs her toolkit, and travels from Colorado Springs to France, and on to Morocco.

There’s plenty of empty time like this, though: sitting in a truck, strength sapped, waiting for something to happen. She doesn’t want to wish any mishaps on the women, and she’s brought books to read, but Driss, her partner this year, is a talker. He’s figured out that it’ll do him no good to hit on Myka—she didn’t say anything directly, of course, for though he’s young, he’s Moroccan, and she’d just as soon not guess wrong about what’s okay—but he seems to have concluded that even if Myka’s not interested in _that_ , she’ll nevertheless be interested in hearing his opinions. And Driss has opinions about a great many things.

He interrupts his explanation of why Moroccan hip-hop is in decline—Myka is pretty sure this is the topic of this afternoon’s animated harangue, as there have been audio, and audiovisual, aids—to take a call: he and Myka are the mechanics closest to a driving team that needs assistance. “Nouvelles joueuses,” he snorts. Driss and Myka speak mostly French to each other, as he doesn’t have much English and the bits of Arabic she has are just different enough from his Moroccan Darija to be more misleading than useful. French is the lingua franca of the rally, generally, and while Driss and Myka’s mutual French isn’t the best, they get by. “Rookies,” he’s just said of the team that’s calling. More literally, “new players.” That’s what the mechanics call the women: players, not drivers or competitors; the rally itself is “le jeu,” the game, and sometimes it’s “la rigolade”—the joke, Myka’s pretty sure—not the rally or the race or any terms that would suggest that it’s a real undertaking requiring real effort. Some of the women on the teams correct them vehemently, repeatedly. Myka doesn’t see much point to doing any correcting herself, vehement or otherwise, as she has to work with the other mechanics all day, every day, and most of the night, every night. In particular, she doesn’t see much point to yelling at Driss about it, because she has to sit right next to him all day. Besides, the vocabulary could be worse. It probably is, when Myka herself is out of earshot.

A black woman and a white woman are sitting in the sand, on the shade side of their 4x4, as Myka and Driss roll up. “Who’s who?” Myka calls out; maybe she’ll get lucky and they’ll be English-speakers.

“I’m the navigator,” says the black woman, in English that to Myka’s ears sounds blessedly unaccented—meaning that she’s Canadian, probably; not many Americans know the rally exists. She stands up and holds out her hand, and Myka takes it first. “I’m Leena. This is Helena.” Both women are extremely good-looking. Driss winks at Myka. This is his “I would like to flirt; maybe you could take the first look at the car?” signal, and Myka finds herself hoping that the women don’t even speak French.

She says, very quickly so Driss will be less likely to understand—though he’d probably just wink again if he did—“Whichever one of you doesn’t want to be chatted up by Romeo here, come show me what’s wrong with the vehicle.” Leena laughs and waves Helena to the front of the car; Myka follows.

“I had hoped not to need your help,” Helena says, in English—and hers is _English_ English. “But.” She gestures into the driver-side wheel well.

Myka sees the trouble immediately: a busted shock absorber. “At some point nearly everybody does. It’s your first two-day leg—impressive that you made it this far. When’d the shock start to go?”

“Yesterday.”

Myka crosses her arms. She’s tempted to snort and echo Driss’s dismissive terminology. “I’m not impressed anymore. You nose-dive on one of those dunes when you’re trying to brake? You could both wind up dead.”

“It’s my fault,” Helena says. “I didn’t want to stop.”

“One of those single-minded rookies?”

“I suppose.”

Myka leans over to get a better look at the shock. With half an ear, she listens to Driss telling Leena that her beauty outshines even the brightness of the desert sun. He really is impossible, albeit in the most charming way. Myka chuckles as Leena tells him, in French that is just as fluent as his (and far more so than Myka’s), that his brain has clearly been fried by precisely that same sun.

No doubt the sun is strong enough to fry a brain. And the wind’s strong today too, even a little stronger than usual; Myka looks up and watches Helena turn her face into it, keeps looking and watches the strands of her long dark hair that are not sweat-stuck to her neck stream out behind her. She really is lovely. Fine-featured. Too skinny, though, with awkward juts of bone. Her wrist-knobs push against only the thinnest layer of skin, and that poor skin’s got the sun- and wind-burnt look that all the drivers develop after the first day, with the whitest women, like this one, resembling pink-grapefruit pulp. Golden and brown complexions—Helena’s driving partner Leena among them—tend more to freshly shelled almonds, while darker black women look slightly abraded, reminding you that leather is skin and skin might become leather. Over it all, though, everyone has a sheen of darker orange, from the dirt, as if they’d all been issued the same blush compact, shade “Moroccan desert,” along with their Gazelles rally cargo vests.

Helena’s voice, restrained as it is, is compelling too. A little rough: fatigue and sand will do that. Myka would like to hear that voice say more, but she’s got to get on with installing the new shock. This is after all a race, even if it isn’t timed. No room, really, to do anything but fix the car, then jack it back down and send these striking women on their way.

But Myka does say, before she and Driss depart, an additional, and firmly cautionary, “If something else goes wrong, call it in.”

Helena responds with a chastened “I will,” and Leena affirms, “I’ll make sure.” Driss winks at Leena. She rolls her eyes, but with a smile, no doubt due to that “beauty-outshines-the-sun” charm. Myka doesn’t wink at Helena—just holds her gaze. It’s a gaze that’s not quite the kind that Myka’s received before from women during this adventure, but it might be related. Yes, Myka would like to keep that gaze on her, and she would certainly not say no to hearing that slightly hoarse voice, which now offers Myka a brief “thank you,” say more.

Myka can’t claim to have been overly virtuous, out in the desert for two weeks a year with a lot of adrenaline-fueled women. Some find themselves very, very hungry, and they can be very, very explicit about what they want. Sometimes it goes spectacularly well and sometimes spectacularly poorly, but always it’s no more than a physical action, a fulfillment of the circumstance. And then everyone goes home, back to whatever lives they have.

The life Myka has is one in which she works on cars in Colorado. Other than two weeks a year in Morocco, it’s pretty quiet. Predictable. By design, it’s quiet and predictable. And she knows what a strangely out-of-character statement it sounds like, sometimes: “Can’t fit your car in before the beginning of April. I’ll be in Morocco.” Then again it’s just a higher-class version of the terse explaining she did when she was in the military: “Can’t. I’ll be in the Middle East.”

That evening, Myka closes the hood on a vehicle inspection, her ninth? Tenth? Enough for a break, anyway. She doesn’t smoke, so doesn’t join the other mechanics; she walks instead. She walks to the edge of the camp, where the tents, the semis, the gear, all the bivouac-supporting material ends. Seven hundred people’s worth of stuff, everything and more, even unto luxurious hot showers. The walk takes a while. But at the edge where she lands, she sees Helena’s driving partner, Leena, looking out into the deepening gloom.

“She went for a walk,” is Leena’s greeting to Myka. “You can see her footprints.”

She can indeed see them. They’re all she can see, leading out, to the point at which the desert dusk defeats her eyes. Myka doesn’t mind the limited vision. She tries not to look at the horizon in daylight; the desert reaches too far. Once the sun goes down, she relaxes: all the danger’s right there at your feet, not in your head. “She some kind of risk junkie? Some kind of weirdly quiet adrenaline-chaser?”

“She just doesn’t care. Anymore.”

“Should I ask why not? Never mind, I won’t even ask if I should ask. What I’ll say is that _you_ don’t seem like a risk junkie, so don’t let her get away with anything with the car.” Myka turns toward the camp, then turns back. “Also, go get her. Don’t let her walk around in the damn desert alone.”

“I don’t have a machete,” Leena says. She points at Myka’s midsection.

Myka looks at the blade—it’s not nearly long enough to qualify as a machete—hanging from her belt. The she looks at Leena. “You want _me_ to go get her?”

“Yes, I do. Because I don’t want to walk around in the desert alone without a machete till I catch up with her.”

“Are you two always this much trouble?”

“I’m no trouble at all. It’s just her.”

“No problem believing that,” Myka says. She looks at Leena, looks out at the sand. She rolls her eyes and follows the footprints. Follows and follows and follows and follows until finally she nearly trips over a too-skinny, sunburnt white woman sitting on the downslope of a dune.

“Do you have a death wish?” Myka demands.

Helena doesn’t bother to turn her dark eyes up to Myka.

“You’re right. Not my business. Still, it’d be bad for the rally if you got hurt out here.”

Helena doesn’t say anything.

Myka sighs. “Okay. I told Leena I’d come out here and get you, but you don’t want to be got. So do whatever it is that you do want to do. I guess I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

“That isn’t possible. Not in this life.” Now she does look up. “What about you? Are you looking for something?”

“Other than you, because your friend Leena told me to, because she doesn’t have a machete, never mind that I don’t either?” She offers a little laugh, gets nothing back. Nothing, that is, other than a vaguely challenging air of _answer me_. “Okay. Looking for something? Nothing special. How to get from one day to the next. Not hurt anybody in the process.” She shrugs.

“Those sound like things you’ve already found. Or already knew.”

“You might be surprised.”

“I suppose I might.” She pauses. “But special.”

“Special?”

“You said, nothing special. Those things sound special. To me.” Myka can find no response to that. Helena goes on, “It was strange, walking out here. I would look back at the camp and see all that activity, then turn this way and… nothing.”

“Haven’t spent a lot of time in the desert, have you?”

Helena seems to ignore her. “It felt like looking at the past… then the future.”

“That’s your future? Nothing?”

“If there’s something, I can’t see it.”

“Skin cancer, if you don’t wear more sunscreen. And a bigger hat.”

“You’re not my—” She stops, coughs.

“Your what? Your mother? I’m not anybody’s mother.” Myka chuckles, and in the next moment she understands how wrong she was to do that, for Helena says a marmoreal “Nor am I. Not anymore.” Then Helena makes another sound, something like a dry heave. She stands up. “I don’t suppose you’d be kind enough to bodyguard me back?”

“To the past?” Now Myka’s not trying to be funny.

“If only you could.”

And Myka wonders how recently it happened. Helena seems too stunned for it to have been very long, but too resigned for it to have been just a little time. No, her loss has worked its way around, found some room to settle in, to make itself right at home.

“I hope you find what you’re looking for,” Myka says again when they get back to the edge of the camp, as they part. All Helena says is a quiet “thank you.”

Myka expects that will be the end of it, barring more car trouble, and with twenty mechanic teams following nearly two hundred vehicles, what are the odds anyway that she and Driss would be closest to Helena and Leena’s car? For a brief indulgent moment, she imagines that she and Driss _could_ be the ones. What expression Helena would show, when she realized who it was. What Helena would then say; what Myka would say in response. In the end, she settles for pre-envying whoever fate decides it will be.

****

But the next night, and then the next and the next and the next, each night of the rally, as if by previous arrangement, Myka and Helena somehow contrive to run into each other, and to then walk in the desert. The second time they do this, they’re far out from the camp, in the early evening, and Helena sees some movement in the sand. She startles, moving nearer Myka. “Not a viper,” Myka assures her after taking a closer look, blade raised. “Just a skink.” Helena still looks spooked, so Myka tells her, “They call them desert fish. They can swim way down into the sand. That’s what they do in the daytime, to get away from those first few inches that get so hot. But feel the top now: it’s cool. The minute the sun goes down, that top layer gives up. All its energy, right back into the air.”

Helena kneels down, touches the sand. “Involuntary.”

Myka doesn’t say anything; she’s just quiet. She’s not sure she can remember any moment of her time in any desert ever being this quiet. Helena stands up again. They stand still, together, on the now-cool sand. The darkness dissolves their view. After a time, Myka says, “I have to get back. Driss and I are working on the trucks tonight, and they can take a while.”

They walk back. Helena doesn’t re-expand the space between them. Startled into nearness, she doesn’t move away. Her sunburnt left arm and shoulder radiate soft warmth across the now-smaller distance that separates her body from Myka’s.

****

The following evening, Myka asks, “Why’d Leena do this with you?” What she means is _who is she to you_ —she doesn’t think the answer will disturb her, but she needs to know. She’s trying not to interrogate that need.

“She was the one who wanted to do this. The navigational aspect.”

“Really? I mean I know she’s good, because you’re doing pretty well. Particularly given that it’s your first time, but I—”

“She has a collection of compasses.” Then Helena says, as if sharing a true confidence, “Her most prized possession is a ship’s binnacle from the early nineteenth century.”

“That’s not what I expected.”

“She also has a great deal of money.” This news, unlike the previous, is indifferently offered. “I have some, but she has a great deal more.”

“I figured at least one of you had to. No sponsor logos on your car or anything.” Helena just nods. Indifferent about that, too. “So okay, if Leena didn’t do this with you, then why’d you do it with her?”

“I had nothing else to do. Nowhere else to be.”

Myka tries, “Is it all right if I like that you had nowhere else to be?”

That gets her a look, but not a real answer. “Did you have anywhere else to be?” Helena asks.

“Well. I’m here. So I guess not.”

“Didn’t you?” She doesn’t echo Myka, doesn’t say anything about liking it. But there’s a settling in, there in that “didn’t you.”

Okay. “See those little crisscrossed tracks in the sand? Do you know what those are from?” Helena shakes her head. “Scarab beetles. You might see some, every now and then. Probably not any real wildlife, but in undisturbed sand—I mean if you’re lucky enough to see _that_ , with all these people around—anyway, early in the morning? You should look for pawprints. Tiny ones: they’re from fennec foxes, jerboas, those kinds of little guys. It’s funny, though, given the name of this whole thing: I’ve never seen hoofprints. I think those gazelles are mythical.”

“Mythical gazelles?” Helena smiles, just a little, and Myka feels that if she could have seen any version of that smile in the past, it would have been as warm and rosy as a sunburn.

“They’re probably like the lions. Used to be all over the place, supposedly, but they aren’t anymore. The desert certainly likes to empty itself out. Ha. Desert itself.”

“Whom did you lose?”

Myka usually feels her blood jump in response to such a question, a little defensive “how do I answer this” fight-or-flight pulse. But it doesn’t come, even as she waits for it. She waits through more time than most interlocutors would be willing to endure with her, but she wants to make sure. Finally, she shrugs, at herself and at the question. She says, “All I did was fix cars. Three deployments. I was there to fix cars, but—you can imagine. Or I hope you can’t, but the first one, you find out all kinds of things. Of course. All the—anyway, what happens. But I had weird luck. I _was_ weird luck. Anybody who knew me, nothing happened to them.” She always says it like that, and it’s always wrong. She always has to stop and correct herself: “Nothing physical, I mean. Guys’d come introduce themselves, even. And so the pressure, you know? And the relief when I got to go home.

“And so the second tour, when I went, I had no idea. The first guy I ran into, who I knew from before, he was fine. Met some new people, they went out, did some things, they were fine. But then it did happen. A convoy I was on, a roadside IED, and that was it.

“It’s not that I believed anything. I really didn’t, and nobody else really did either. Everybody knows luck runs out. Even weird luck. Especially weird luck. So in the end, all I did was fix cars. That’s all I did.” Helena’s face is showing not doubt, not exactly that, but Myka follows up with, “It’s what I try to think about. It’s what I try to think about, but I’m not in denial.” She tries for a self-deprecating smile, falls short. “But I guess I’d be lying if I said I was completely sure about that.”

“I’d be lying if I said I was sure about anything,” Helena says. “Loss. Purposes for it.”

That’s enough of that. For now. “One thing I know I’m sure about is that you should wear more sunscreen. Why didn’t you listen to me? Your arm looks like the inside of an overripe cantaloupe.”

Helena holds up her left arm, scrutinizes it as closely as she can in the twilight. “Even more? I’ve had to steal from Leena already.”

“Don’t feel too bad,” Myka tells her. “I ran out, my first year—I did think I understood desert sun. But even when you know, you forget fast. After the first couple days I’m pretty sure all the women thought the only French I knew was how to say ‘do you have any extra sunscreen.’”

“Perhaps they thought you were shy.”

Myka does manage a smile now, because she’s thinking of one particular woman, that first year, who didn’t seem to care at all whether Myka was or wasn’t shy. “Well,” she says. “Maybe.”

****

Myka is accustomed to having to start any conversation between herself and Helena, but the next night, Helena does. “So,” she says, with peculiar determination. “Have you been busy?” It is the most transparent, yet at the same time deniable, expression of possessiveness that Myka has ever heard: such an innocent question, yet asked so very uncasually.

Myka wants to grin at it. Instead she deadpans, “Busy how?”

“With… calls. For your assistance.”

“Today?”

“Or other days. We called on you only once.”

“Did anything else break?”

“I told you I’d call.”

“You wouldn’t necessarily have got me and Driss if you did. It’s whoever’s closest.”

Helena doesn’t respond.

“But obviously you know that,” Myka says.

“Should I not ask?”

“What do you want me to tell you? We’ve pulled I can’t even count how many vehicles out of dunes. Fixed I didn’t even bother to count how many broken ones.”

“Have they been terribly broken?” Helena’s very good with these deniable questions, with their coating of covetousness.

In response, Myka manages, “Nobody else drove for over a day on a busted shock.” That gets her a twist of lip: a little grimace that Myka knows should not call to her in such a primitive way. But that tiny motion, or Helena’s jealous questions plus now that tiny motion, sets Myka to physical wishing. She clears her throat. “Yeah, no day-old busted shocks. Lots of radiator problems. Somebody’s fuel line blew: dramatic, but it was an easy patch. Anyway, mostly radiators, the whole water jacket. Overheating, and that will without doubt kill an engine. Always seems so funny, how much they hate heat, since it’s the point—combustion, I mean—but they have to be able to get rid of it. And didn’t they tell you in your training to wait till some heat bleeds off before you try to get at the coolant? People popping radiator caps, I swear—I can’t tell you how many scalded hands I see every single year during this thing.”

Helena holds out her hands. To prove they’re unscalded, yet Myka’s seeing them not as evidence, but as hands. Elegant hands. She coughs. “Let me guess: because you haven’t overheated yet. The engine, I mean. The car’s engine. Hasn’t.”

Helena doesn’t speak. She lets her arms fall to her sides.

“Well.” Myka coughs again. “When it happens, do us both a favor and wait ten minutes. And then of course there’s the sand, speaking of things engines hate. And the terrain. Those dunes, which a lot of you really don’t know how to drive. No offense.”

“Perhaps I’ll take some regardless.”

“I guess that’s fair.” She stops. Tries to decide; mostly does. “The other calls don’t matter.”

“Are you sure?”

Myka would say something, but she is trying to deal again with physical wishing, for that “are you sure” was as jealous as “have you been busy” and “have they been terribly broken,” but also spiked with a tension that makes Myka want to reassure her: _If you need to call me your property_. Instead, Myka just looks at her. Wishes for her.

“Ça va avec ton petit fantôme?” Driss asks Myka, back at the cars. _How’s it going with your little ghost._ This is what he’s taken to calling Helena; he saw the two of them returning to camp, the first time, and was skeptical of Myka’s “seulement une promenade” as a description of what they’d been doing. She hadn’t really known how to convey “it’s not like that”—or rather, “it’s clearly not going to be like that”—if that was even what he was implying. Morocco: who could say? So she’d told him, “Elle est triste. Elle veut parler. Un peu.” _She’s sad. She wants to talk. A little._

“Avec _vous_?” His incredulity was clear: why would anyone choose, given a choice, to talk to taciturn _Myka?_

“Je peux. Quand je veux.” _I can. When I want._

“Et vous voulez. Avec elle. Parce que…?”   _And you want. With her. Because….?_

“Je vous l’ai dit. Elle est triste.”   _I told you. She’s sad._

But there must have been something in the way Myka said that, some overly defensive note, because Driss became even more skeptical. “Parce qu’elle est triste? J’crois pas. J’crois que cette meuf, tu la kiffes.”   _Because she’s sad? I don’t think so. I think you’re into that girl._ That last, he said with a little grin, a little nod.

They hadn’t been tutoyer-friendly, not up to that point, but apparently if he was going to talk openly about who Myka might be into—surprising, but honestly a relief—he was going to do it as her wink-nudge best buddy. So she felt perfectly justified in offering him a not-quite-surly “Ta gueule.”   _Shut up_.

He had smiled more widely. “Tu la kiffes, tu la kiffes,” he sing-songed. Myka just shook her head, so he shrugged and offered, “Elle est belle. Mais si maigre, comme pas là, comme un fantôme. Un petit fantôme triste.”   _She’s pretty, but so skinny, like not there, like a ghost. A sad little ghost._

She couldn’t really argue with him.

“Ça va,” she tells him now. “Mais pas le mien.” _But not mine_.

“Ohhhh kaaaaay,” he says at her. “P’tit fantôme de personnnnnnne. Seulement p’tit fantôme qui tu kiiiiiiiffes.”   _Noooobody’s little ghost. Only a little ghost who you waaaant._ If she had a little brother, this might be what it would feel like to have spent too much time in the desert with him, fixing cars: Driss offers up more of his very un-Moroccan interior giggly teenager every time he talks about how much Myka obviously kiffes her little ghost. Juvenile slang. But Myka might as well think a word that isn’t really hers when she thinks of Helena, of what this walking and talking is about. She might as well think _je te kiffe_ , keep the entire experience foreign, different. Let the verb connecting “I” and “you” be part of no real language at all.

****

On the last night of the rally—it comes after the second of the two two-day drives, and the camp is largely quiet for once, with most of the teams passed out, even more tired than they’ll be tomorrow when it’s all over—Myka is wrenching a quad bike’s slightly bent upright back to true. It’s not a real concern; it would probably make it through tomorrow’s last stage with barely even a shudder. But she’d needed something to do, something to occupy at least her hands, because Helena and Leena had been late getting in. (She’s been tracking their 4x4’s GPS on her own phone, since that first maintenance call. She’s not proud of that, particularly not that she’s kept doing it. At first it was just because Helena was so determined and attractive, and she should’ve stopped when she understood more. But she hasn’t stopped.) Leena must have uncharacteristically pointed them a bit off course, because they overshot the checkpoint by several miles.

She stands up to stretch out her legs and her back. Nobody ever told her, so many years ago in high school autoshop, that working on cars is mostly about your back. She resents the omission. The LED light bar leaning against the front wishbone barely illuminates the workings of the bike, and there’s deep shadow between this vehicle and the next one over, from which she hears Driss inform a lug nut that it is the son of adultery. That much of his Arabic, she can understand, and it gives her a welcome laugh.

Then she sees that she’s got additional company.

“You should be asleep,” she tells the woman who has appeared in front of her. “You’ve been driving for almost two days straight.”

Helena shakes her head. “Leena made me stop, a few hours ago. She took over.”

“Is that why you two went so far off course? _You_ were trying to navigate?”

“You’re tracking us?”

“We track everybody.” She relents. “But yes. I’m tracking you.”

“Why?”

Helena must, given that question, want her to say it out loud, and Myka could say it out loud. There’s no real reason not to. But instead she says, “Why aren’t you sleeping?” Because Helena really should be sleeping. She isn’t standing solidly, and her face looks like it’s been smeared with ashes from a campfire long cold. Not even a pink undertone, here in the dark.

“I hadn’t seen you,” Helena says. “For two days. And I was supposed to be navigating, but I fell asleep and I dreamed… or I dreamed that I fell asleep… and the dream was about you. Or the sleep…”

“Go lie down, at least. You’ve seen me now; you can go lie down.”

Helena takes a step in Myka’s direction.

This is so very clearly a version of what Myka had in mind, after that first maintenance call: some needful note like this in Helena’s voice, some blind movement like this of her body toward Myka’s. It isn’t any kind of nobility that makes Myka say “I mean it. Lie down. Get some rest, because you’ve got more driving to do. I’ll see you tomorrow, after it’s done, and you can tell me how you feel then.” It isn’t noble. Not noble: because nobody noble would feel the utter disappointment that overtakes Myka when Helena turns and walks away.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 1 tumblr tags: consider slow processes, all the things we humans are forced to do in slow motion, you can't mourn quickly, you can't heal quickly, or rather, you can't choose the speed at which these processes unspool, you can't sleep quickly either, (though I would find that helpful), anyway I've been doing 'put a comma in; take a comma out' on this for too long, so up the first part goes, it's probably clear that I'm working through some stuff over which I have no control, please pardon my treating myself to some therapy


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve played a little fast and loose with the rally’s timeline in this part; this year, it took the driving teams and the rest of the retinue two days to get from the actual finish to Essaouira, where they had the closing celebratory ceremonies. I plead lack-of-structural-imagination-regarding-what-to-use-those-two-days-for license, particularly how I left things at the end of part 1. Mostly, though, I just wanted to get them to lovely Essaouira. Because everyone should have some loveliness.

“Et maintenant?” Driss asks. _And now?_  It is late in the day, this last day, and he and Myka are driving their last drive together, towards the finish. The finish at Essaouira: lovely breezy city by the sea.

“Quoi?” she asks back, as blank a _What?_ as she can manage _._ He gives her a little _tch,_ a _don’t play dumb_ noise, so she says, “Je pas.” _I don’t know_.  Another _tch_. “Je sais pas ce qu’elle veut.”   _I don’t know what she wants._

“Toutes les meufs, elles veulent la même.”  _All the girls, they want the same._ He’s very confident; his _take it easy_ tone is clear.

“Moi, ouais?”   _Me, yeah?_

That sends him into hysterics, as intended. He deserves some reward, however small, for having put up with Myka, and for being who he’s been about the whole thing. She grins at him and says, “Tous les mecs, ils veulent la même aussi.”   _All the guys, they want the same thing too._  “Les détails.”   _The details._

He laughs again and settles in to cajole her into divulging any and all details regarding what she has got up to with women.

One track of her mind carries on joshing with him. Another track reminds her, over and over, that she in fact doesn’t know what Helena wants or how she feels. What will Helena tell her when they see each other at the finish? _If_ they see each other at the finish, and _if_ Helena tells her anything at all. People often change their minds, once the rally ends. Once they leave the desert, people often change their minds.

As Myka and Driss drive on, the wet salt of Essaouira begins to make itself known. In the desert, the smell of water always precedes the sight, so they sniff like animals for more of the sea, feel its approach in the air, wait for it until it flickers, right at the horizon, then swells up fully into view. Driss points, like an overexcited five-year-old, like Myka can’t see it for herself. “Fin,” he declares, “enfin!” _The end, at last!_  If Myka weren’t driving, she would hug him.

****

In Myka’s hotel room that night, Helena is not telling Myka how she feels. She is pulling at the seams of Myka’s clothes, at all of her utilitarian maintenance garb—belt, pockets, velcro, snaps, loops—with strange attention. That’s all she’s doing. She’s not trying to get the clothes off, and her touch has no intimacy. It’s just busy hands. They are here together because when Myka said “where are you staying,” Helena said “I don’t care.” Myka should have told her again to go get some sleep, but instead she just let Helena follow her.

Following as evasion? That’s what it feels like now, because now, her hands on Myka’s clothes, Helena says “you don’t have to do this” like she both does and doesn’t want Myka to stand here and take it. Myka’s willing to stand here, for as long as it takes; she wants this too-thin body against hers, because of these days of looking and talking and _je te kiffe_ and waiting for what might happen. She’s been looking at that body, listening to the too-terse voice that emerges from it, and she… wants it. The verb is not the slangy out-of-time _kiffer_ ; she _wants_ it. She wants it because of the damage, because damage calls to damage. But she would stop because of damage too. “You don’t have to do this either,” Myka tells her. “You have a choice. I really want to know you’re making a choice.”

“I haven’t. Not since. I can’t remember my last real choice.”

Help her. Help her. “You picked me over Driss.”

“What?”

“He’s awfully charming. You could be here with him instead.”

“Are you trying to make me laugh?” She says that like it’d be the most preposterous undertaking—the same way she might say “are you trying to fly me to the moon.”

“Would that be so bad? If I tried?” Neither of those would be bad: making Helena laugh, flying her to the moon. Flying a laughing Helena to the moon.

Earlier in the evening, at the finish, Myka had watched Helena and Leena fling themselves from their 4x4, moving their drive-sore bodies as exuberantly as they seemingly could. Helena embraced Leena, who instantly stiffened, then relaxed with a laugh of translucent joy. Then Helena caught sight of Myka, and some strange energy propelled her directly into Myka’s unsuspecting arms. Myka had felt a strangeness in that embrace, something that made her stand back a bit, just for a second, as Leena had, but she’d chalked that up to the ambiguity between herself and Helena about what might or might not happen. Now, though, “Helena,” she says, “when was the last time you touched anyone? Before today?” She doesn’t expect an answer.

But: “Intentionally?” Helena asks. As if she’s going to need to make excuses for the impurity of bumping into someone on the street. “The day she died.”

So all right, that’s what this is for. Whatever happens, this is so Helena can remember what it’s like to touch someone, anyone; to make a choice, any choice, in a circumstance that can be left behind. That’s what Myka’s two weeks a year in Morocco are, really: a way of letting herself, or even just her body, remember a time, but do it with low, low stakes. Fix cars in the desert for a while. Fix cars in the desert with no consequences. That’s possible now. Six years ago, she wouldn’t have believed it, but now, maybe, and maybe even mostly, she does. Now, maybe, and maybe even mostly, she believes that everything that happens when you fix cars in the desert doesn’t have to come home with you. Some of it, and maybe even most of it, can stay there, in the desert, when you leave.

So she waits. For this choice that Helena will make that has no real consequences: if they don’t do anything at all, even if they don’t do so much as shake hands, it’s still a choice, one that Helena will have made.

Helena’s hands on Myka’s clothes do not still—she is now working one velcro strap, over and over, rip, press, rip, press—as she says, “I never saw any pawprints.”

The nervous, harried creatures that would have left those prints, they would have accepted Helena as one of their own. “It wasn’t a test,” Myka tells her. “None of this is a test.”

“None of it?” Busy hands, busy. Is it that she is taking care not to touch—or if she touches not to press—anywhere likely to make Myka react in a way that will be irrefutable?

“Not with me. No wrong answers.” Nothing in Helena’s aspect changes, and Myka can’t bear not to give her a little more help. Just a little more help. “Actually there is one wrong answer, because I need to ask you if it’s okay if I sit down on the bed, and ‘no’ is not going to work. I might fall over.”

Helena’s hands stop. They fall. “Yes,” she says.

It’s a beautifully ornate bed Myka now sits down on, here in a beautifully simple room. She’s had great luck in Essaouira, never stayed in a hotel or guest house or anywhere that wasn’t some distilled visual essence of by-the-sea Morocco—the perfect mix of rectitude and lassitude. This room so casually houses a sumptuous bed within rough beams and simple terracotta tile: as if the sultan will be gracing this humble space with his presence and has sent this symbol of his wealth ahead, preparing the poor chamber to receive so exalted a body. Myka runs her hands over the textiles and says, “Exam over; you pass with flying colors.” She looks at Helena and smiles, just because of all this beauty: the room, the woman, the moment that is not now, and not yet, and maybe never, but beautiful all the same.

“I mean to everything.”

There’s a sharp realness to that—such that Myka falls back on the bed, laughs, and believes her. Believes her and says “come here,” and Helena does. She walks to the bed; she directs an odd, demure gaze down at her hands as she sits, unmoving, next to Myka.

Myka lies on her back, looking up; Helena looms in her field of vision like a somber marble monument. “I wanted you since I first saw you,” Myka tells her. “And heard you. Should I say things like that?”

“I told you: yes to everything.”

Myka sits up again and reaches to her with one hand. Touches Helena’s jaw—and Helena sighs a tiny sigh, warm as her sunburnt skin. Myka waits for her to flinch away, waits for a twitch of distress. _Don’t shy_ , she prepares to say, but who is she to tell Helena what to do? But Helena doesn’t balk. Well, then, who is Myka to lean toward Helena; who is she to coax Helena’s body, face, lips, nearer, so close that not to kiss would make no sense? Who is Myka to do anything she does—but it is what she does.

The kiss feels like a first kiss should, with its progression from instant familiarity—this is a kiss, this is how to perform it—to discomfort—is this the right performance for this kiss, this person; is this how we are meant to fit together or should it be different—then both at once—this is right, this is meant, but can we live up to the rightness and meaning that we are promising each other by bringing our mouths together this way at first?

Such a relief, that the first kiss feels like this.

“I wanted you since I first saw you,” Myka says again. She resists asking _did you want me_.

“Your tale of asking other women for sunscreen,” Helena says.

“What?”

“That’s when it happened. I hadn’t expected to. Hadn’t imagined I could.” An unbusy hand—a goal-directed hand—rises now to the lower edge of Myka’s shirt. Begins to work its way up. Gets flat against Myka’s torso, which heats instantly in response.

“Could what?”

“Wake up. Bodily.” Now she puts her mouth on Myka’s, pushing forward with that newly awakened body.

Unclothing Helena hurts Myka’s eyes—the visible too-thin is so manifest—and it hurts Myka’s hands, too, because of that same manifestation. The gliding journey of fingers at last mapping skin should be smooth, fleshy, but every protrusion of skeletal housing is too prominent. Every joint is visible, every length made longer by its lank. Helena’s body fits among the creatures of the desert, with their elongations, exaggerations, features that speak of collection, conservation. Limited resources. No excess. Less and less and less.

She fits the privation of the desert, but bodies want to be profligate. She fits its aridity, but bodies want to be humid. Particularly in proximity: they volunteer moisture, mix it. A kiss is, is confirmation of, shared wetness.

The veins and vessels of the desert run deep, safeguarding themselves from the ruinous scrutiny of the sun—but when bodies meet, they bring up the hoarded blood, all that secret sweat.

The body, the bone: Myka hesitates. Helena says, “I’m not fragile.”

We’re all fragile, Myka would tell her, but arguing the point, that’s hesitation too. Instead—and she wants to sound gentle, but her voice comes out clamorous, in pieces—she says, “What do you like? Tell me, or show me, and I’ll—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Helena says, low and sandy.

Myka wrestles herself back down to some calm, so she can reassure, so she can do this the right way: “It does. I want to give you what you like.”

“No, I mean it _won’t_ matter. Anything you do—”

And that proves to be true. Myka has to do barely anything at all, other than be a body, and that is fine. That is _fine_. She is grateful to be a body, to be _the_ body, the one that Helena can use as she practices letting go. Of herself, of it all. This is all there is, this physical pushing _toward_. It’s like the rally itself, for some women: something to focus on. A goal. Manufactured, but a goal all the same, and  Helena’s goal here tonight—and maybe it’s just as manufactured, and that, too, is fine—can be, clearly is, to break against an awestruck Myka, convulsing with what Myka hopes is pure, thoughtless pleasure. She deserves pleasure.

And yet Helena says, reading Myka’s thoughts, “I don’t deserve this.”

“I can’t tell you what you deserve.” Tell anything to this woman whose body is on hers? Of course she can’t. But also: deserve _this_? But what _is_ this?

Two people who are strangers to each other are having sex in a hotel room in a country foreign to them both.

Or:  
Two people who are not quite strangers to each other are taking advantage of an opportunity for physical connection.

Or even:  
Two people who were once strangers to each other are becoming lovers for a night.

A night and a day, because they do get a day (and they can have, and they will take, yet one more night), and their day is not an extension of their first night so much as a reinterpretation of it: they can _be close_. For a day in Essaouira.

From the medina to the waterfront, to the fish market teeming with seagulls and stray cats—the cats replete, not restricted to desert rations. All the fish they can cadge. They pick their begged sardines apart with no urgency, as if they too are tourists, as if this dining is as fine as any Essaouira affords.

In the souk, Myka says, “Let me buy you something.”

“I don’t need anything.”

Myka would like to stop imagining how Helena would finish such pronouncements: _I don’t need anything that you can buy for me._ She tries to replace that by saying, out loud, “But you could let me.” She looks around, gestures at a display. “Would you wear a fez?” That gets her a wrinkle of the brow, coupled with a smile that might just outpace the one Helena bestowed on Myka in the wake of the mythical gazelles. (She will compare all of Helena’s smiles to that one, the first one she earned. She knows now how hard-won it was.) “You said ‘yes to everything,’” Myka accuses, which gets her yet another quirk of the lip. She buys Helena a scarf instead, one with a pattern striving to encompass all the colors that surround them: the mountains of bright spices; the eroded, shabby blue boats on the water; the tabbies and calicos; the fishy silver glisten of the sea and the catch it yields.

They pay a few dirhams to enter a little museum in a riad: tranquil and bright, it offers display cases featuring historical costumes, musical instruments, manuscripts. Myka starts to make some offhand comment about the past. Then she remembers their first real conversation. Instead she says, of the traditional music that a sound system is playing just slightly too softly, “Hear that? Whatever stringed instrument that is? Driss would hate it.”

Helena looks puzzled. “That’s a strong word.”

“He has strong feelings about music that isn’t hip-hop. And music that is hip-hop.”

“So, about music.” She says this like she is hiding amusement. Myka has never heard her say anything with such deadpan charm before.

“Well, when you put it that way.” Myka pulls on the end of the scarf, which Helena has draped lightly around her neck and over one shoulder, and shakes it lightly against Helena’s cheek. Helena grabs it back and flips its tassels in Myka’s direction. It’s nothing—meaningless movement. But Myka thinks _Look at how she could play._

They walk on the beach, where the sea winds soothe, emollient against the abrasions of the harsh, steady push of desert air. Myka has always found the Essaouira breezes a perfect refreshment at the end of the rally, but on this day with Helena, they have an astringent sweetness that is new.

Breeze, setting sun. Myka has spent time on east coasts and west coasts, watched suns rise from oceans and set into them. Today, she prefers the set. This set, right as the sun disappears, splitting the view into strata, with a high, thick line of uncolored bright sky, dappled with darker gray clouds like pebbles, then a yellow-orange band meeting, with precision, the aqua ocean, then glistening gold again, where the remaining light reflects off the saturated beach. A wrong rainbow spectrum: yet a rainbow all the same, one that fills the entire view. She reaches for Helena’s hand, and they stand in silence, as they did in the desert, but touching now. Together.

“Leena won’t mind that I’ve stolen you?” She berates herself aloud: “I should have thought to ask before now.”

“She encouraged me. At first. To find you. Walk with you.”

“That’s why you did it?”

Helena closes her eyes against the sunset. “At first. She wanted to get to know one of the journalists.”

“Okay.” This doesn’t bother Myka; things happen for the reasons they happen. “So you didn’t mind getting out of the way?”

“I owed her some freedom. She’s put up with a great deal from me, lately. I’m not the life of the party.”

That makes Myka smile. “If I could kiss you now, I would,” she says, because it’s true: Helena’s not the life of the party. She’s a respite from the party, from some party Myka never realized she had ended up at, and on top of that would never have chosen to go to anyway. Was Helena like this before? All Myka knows is how Helena is now, and she likes it. Which makes it all the more ironic, and maybe even poignant, that Helena now says to Myka, “I’d like to be more like you. Like this.”

It’s all she can do not to direct a sad laugh at her former self. “I wanted to be more like this too. Five or six years ago, I wasn’t, and I wanted to be.”

“And so? What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything. Well. I _did_ five or six years. I wish I had a better answer. For some people, it’s therapy. For me, time.” She looks out at the sky and the sea; the strata are blending into a rosy, fading glow, but the water still shines. “Time plus Morocco.”

Time they don’t have, but Morocco they do. One night left. They eat, until they are replete like those cats; they drink, as those cats might do if they knew how it would make them feel; and in the room, this time, no hesitation, no “you don’t have to.” No difference, in fact, between want to and have to.

There’s not much that ripens in the desert, but what does is powerful.

Two nights—that isn’t any time at all. Myka knows it, and maybe three nights would have been better, or maybe three would have been too much. Maybe this tight timeline has made all the difference.

It’s all right not to know.

The dusk of Helena’s left arm… that out-of-the-car arm. Against the paler rest of her body, it seems part of her but not part. Someone else’s arm. She grips around Myka’s neck with that arm. Around Myka’s waist, her hips. She makes love with a determined fervor, each time as if she has just learned how, as if trying to burn it so brightly that she will not forget. “You feel so good,” she gasps, and Myka, still hearing more than Helena says, finds the undertone: _how dare you feel so good_. And its guiltily ecstatic backbeat: _how dare I feel so good, in response, with you. Beside you, against you. With, against, beside your living body._

And yet: “This is easy,” Helena says. “You make this easy.”

And if a graceless push and drive for connection and completion can be easy, then yes. None of the words are easy, though; none of the words are quite right. Words that Helena’s hands rip from Myka’s throat: they sometimes sound like “I” and “you.” But any verb that connects them? Call it slang. Call it a word from no real time, no real place. Call it incomprehensible anywhere but here and now.

This second night, the last night, sunk deep in the night, Helena cries—not hugely, not with any straightforward violence of loss, but as if she has been taught how to behave in a more decorous age and now finds herself in a strange raw time—a sad queen pulled from the wrong history.

Myka says words, tells her things, until she can feel Helena breathe as no one does when awake.

The role of mirrors in Renaissance paintings.  
Wildlife specific to Papua New Guinea.  
Off-label uses for hypertension drugs.  
Patents issued to Thomas Edison.

These things and more: she doesn’t know all of any of these things. But she knows some of each of them, because finding information takes up time.

Sometimes all you can do to preserve yourself is take up time. And sometimes all you can do for someone else, too, is take up time… take up time, hand over information. Loss leaves purposeless space in its wake, space that might as well be filled with everything and nothing.

(You want to exile yourself, to give yourself what you think you deserve. That’s all right, but here, take these lists with you.)  
(Consult them in some future hour, if you like.)  
(This one tells locations of ancient salt mines.)  
(This one, apple varieties.)  
(This one? Numbered instructions for constructing a box kite. You yourself may not choose to build such a kite, but should your eyes trace these steps, you might imagine its realization.)

“Some empty future hour,” Myka says to the woman sleeping alive-yet-lifeless against her shoulder.

Salt mined from deep within Helena’s still-mourning body forms rough crystal scuffs where her tears and sweat have dried upon Myka’s skin.

****

Myka rises very early: airports in Morocco demand time. She showers fast, in cold water so she will not be tempted to stand and ruminate. Her small toolkit and her backpack are ready, and she would slip out of the room to spare herself (herself and Helena, herself _and Helena_ ) the goodbye, but Helena awakens. She sits up, holding the white sheet over her naked body with naked arms. Her eyes are swollen. Myka can’t think of anything to say, in the face of such beauty—bare body, white sheet, Essaouira all around her—so she fetches a glass of water. Says “you should rehydrate” as she sets it down.

Helena says a nearly inaudible “thank you.” All of her blood looks to have gathered in the vessels running through the sclera of her eyes. She says it again, louder: “thank you.”

Myka has always enjoyed Essaouira. But she has never wanted to stay in Essaouira, and she is not going to start such wanting now. “I hope you find something to look for,” she says.

White sheet, bare body. Helena’s arms still don’t match.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 2 tumblr tags: look, I know there's precious little narrative momentum here, so let's just say that I'm putting some exercises up, (and there is that therapy thing I mentioned earlier), also Essaouira is very pretty, and I like the idea of M and H in that pretty place, and I imagine Leena had a nice time with her journalist too, probably more fun in an existential sense than M and H had, although probably rather differently restorative, given that L is a good navigator, who already knows her way


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This part is mostly just two people standing in a space, having a conversation. There is also some time spent working on a mechanical fuel pump (as opposed to an electric one, because that would have been way too difficult to deal with; they’re located inside the fuel tank). Incidentally, if you feel like trying a DIY removal of the former kind, my understanding is that you’ll need to make sure you plug or cap the fuel tank hose once you’ve disconnected it. Safety first! Which is a maxim on which this Myka and this Helena might be said to have differing takes.

Ten months later

Myka had believed she’d know it was time to quit the rally if, upon hearing from the organizers, she thought about it and felt that something had changed. She’d expected that change to take the form of an unforceful desert, one that put no gas-pedal pressure on her chest.

Which is why it’s funny, a little funny, that her first thought this year has nothing at all to do with the desert: _I can’t face Essaouira_.

But maybe that’s how you move forward. One weight lessens, and you move; another takes its place, and that’s where you stay, under that new weight, for the next while. It’s change, anyway, and that’s what she’s been waiting for.

So she says no.

****

In late March, she doesn’t register that the rally’s start date has come and gone until Wayne Darnell, a longtime customer and friend of her father’s, brings his Oldsmobile to the shop and remarks, “Thought you’d be gone around now.”

“Not this year,” Myka says, and he grunts a noncommittal response. A lot of her father’s friends are like this. It’s a comfort.

She spends the rest of the day not thinking about how she might have been gone around now. After she closes the garage that evening, she starts work on Wayne’s thirty-five-year-old Cutlass Supreme. He refuses to part with that car, despite the fact that she’s had to replace just about every part of every system under its hood. This time it’s the fuel pump; she drove a little way out on the highway during lunchtime, pushed it to sixty, seventy, higher, and felt the engine sputter, gasping for gas. Poor Cutlass—this’ll be its second new fuel pump in less than six years. Wayne tends to drive and drive and drive, drive till the tank’s nearly empty, and Myka’s told him to knock that off, that it shortens the life, just fill up at a quarter tank like normal people do. But Wayne is not the kind of guy to change the way he drives (she suspects he manufactures a thrill, in his mostly thrill-starved life, out of rolling into a gas station on fumes), so he pays Myka more money than anybody with any sense should do, for fuel pumps and radiators and everything else.

At least old-school fuel pumps are easy to get to, easy to get out. A time-consuming yet easy night’s work. She could let it wait till morning, but it’s been years since she hasn’t been sunburned and dehydrated by this point in March, so maybe she’s working late to punish herself for the luxury of not being sunburned and dehydrated.

Or maybe she’s working late so she won’t think about that place where she would be getting sunburned and dehydrated. But she’s started now, and she’s got to make herself stop: so think about the drifts and skiffs of snow lingering on the ground, not about sand. Think about the thick clothes that that snow, and the temperature that sustains it, demand: still her insulated thermal coverall. Not for too much longer, but it’s not some useless, flimsy T-shirt and cargo vest.

Think about the low-rpm drones and coughs of city traffic just outside the garage doors, not about ancient silence broken only by a low, low voice. And certainly not about the reprieving sigh of the sea, broken only by—no. Think about anything but that.

She’s relieved when a knock, a rap on the street door rather than a metallic bang on one of the service doors to the bays, shakes her out of thinking about what she is not thinking about. She wouldn’t be half surprised to see Wayne—who is as unsentimental as they come but who loves his ridiculous boat of a car—dropping in to check on her progress, because god forbid he or anybody else should wait till business hours for that kind of thing. Then again everybody who knows Myka does know she’s right here, most nights, for whatever the reason is on any given night. She hasn’t run out of cars yet, at least.

As she unbolts the door, she runs through what she’ll need to tell Wayne about the fuel pump in, or now almost out of, the Cutlass, or what she might say to anybody who’s got a car on the floor or out back. She supposes it could be either Manny or Alicia, back to grab some forgotten item, or even trainee Bobby, but he only comes in on the weekends, and Myka’s honestly not sure he doesn’t just sleep through all the rest of the days. Though she also supposes that since her employees aren’t Wayne, they’d be more inclined to do something normal, like text. Or understand—better than she herself does—that most things can wait till morning anyway.

She is so busy supposing, she doesn’t bother to look up until she’s pulled the door fully open, and then only because nobody’s said anything.

The only mirage Myka has ever seen is the is-that-actually-water shimmer in the distance on blistering-hot asphalt. (It’s never water.) (Nobody ever really believes it’s water.) (If you don’t ever really believe it, was it ever really a mirage?)

It would be better if she couldn’t make sense of what her eyes are telling her. It would be better if she could blink and make this sight turn into nothing but some pavement’s fake and far-off shine. She does blink; nothing changes.

“Hello,” says the mirage.

_She is what I would have imagined tonight. Having been reminded, I would not have been able to stop myself from imagining her._

But that imagining would have produced a memory, or an echo of such a memory. This is new.

It’s new and it doesn’t seem to change, no matter how much she blinks. “You’re here,” Myka says, as if a simple declaration could force sense into the sight.

Helena steps into the garage, and Myka can’t make sense of that either: Helena is standing here, inside, in the place that Myka comes _back_ to, bearing nothing but a sunburn, a cargo vest, and the gear she took with her. “I know,” Helena says. “You weren’t _there_.”

“There? You mean the Gazelles? No. I didn’t go this year.”

“I know that too.”

“You went? You drove it again?”

“Yes. But no.”

“What?” Myka doesn’t understand that, as an answer, yet it’s a weirdly right thing for Helena to have said, because yes, here Helena stands, as herself. But no, she is not herself. Myka is staring at Helena’s cheekbones: they are fleshed now, not carved. “Yes but no?”

“Yes, I went. But no, I didn’t drive it. Or rather, I’m not driving it. It’s barely begun.”

“Right.” Myka thinks she could be forgiven for having forgotten that, here in this moment. “But—you went? I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you? All right, I’ll say it: I went, but as a spectator. Thinking I might run into you.”

“You could’ve played that off better if you’d competed. If I’d been there, I mean.” She’s trying to find some footing, but instead she hears herself as dismissive. Trying to play off the fact that someone is standing in front of her in Colorado.

But Helena doesn’t harden in response. “I didn’t feel any need to make it seem like a coincidence. Seeing you.” Myka opens her mouth to ask “why not,” but Helena continues, “‘I’ll wait until it’s time for the Gazelles,’ I told myself some months ago. ‘I’ll wait until then, that long, and I’ll see how I feel.’ And I hope you won’t think me lazy, but there is the fact that it’s far easier for me to go to France than to go to Colorado.”

Myka wants to ask, “You’ll see how you feel about what?” But she can’t get the words out; she is too busy trying to remember if she ever heard Helena offer so extended an utterance as she has just made, and as she remembers it, she did not. That voice never _ran_ like that.

Helena’s voice is still running—not running _out_ , just running: “So I did go to France. The opening ceremonies, in Nice. Then I went to Morocco, on the slim chance that you’d have traveled straight to Tangier for unloading the vehicles. Because Dominique said that you had said no this year, but she does of course find herself increasingly busy as the event itself nears. She delegates; she thought it possible that you had changed your mind at the last minute.”

Myka shakes her head. “I didn’t change my mind at the last minute.” _You are saying so many words_.

“You hadn’t seemed the sort who would, but as I was there in France, it was easier for me to go to Tangier than to go to Colorado.”

“I kind of can’t wait to hear about the unexpected geographic twist that finally makes it easier for you to come to Colorado.” And stand here. And make Myka think of all those things she doesn’t bring back with her.

Helena frowns. This severe frown, Myka remembers, and now they might be standing on silent sand. “There is no unexpected geographic twist. Although I suppose it was easier to go to Colorado from Morocco than it would have been to go to… honestly I don’t know. I had to change airplanes several times.”

“I know. I’m familiar with that trip.”

“I suppose you are.” The frown eases. “Leena says hello, by the way. She wonders whether you carry your machete around with you in Colorado.”

“It isn’t a machete,” Myka says. This, too, takes her back to twilight; it may have been exactly a year ago that Leena sent her out to find a wandering sunburned fool. Helena isn’t sunburned now, though. Looking at her face now, no one would believe that this pale, perfect skin had ever been put through anything so punishing.

Helena says, “Regardless, you bravely faced down a skink.” She smiles, suddenly, and this smile is new. _Jaunty_.

“Who _are_ you?”

“Am I that different?”

“I think you are. You’re so—” Myka searches for the correct word. “Present.”

“I am.” The softening of Helena’s face tells Myka she’s chosen right. “Not always, and perhaps not truly enough, but a great deal more. You were right about time. And there was some therapy as well.”

Myka tries to take her in, this newly extant Helena, tries to step to the side of what happened a year ago and see her fresh. But taking her in, Myka can see so clearly that this new person no more fits in this Colorado Springs garage than the woman from last year would have—for probably a host of different reasons, but one is the same: this new person is wearing a scarf that the other wore on a day that Myka is still trying to leave behind.

“Why are you here?” Myka asks. “You don’t belong here. A day in Essaouira…” Saying certain things in Arabic feels to Myka like breathing—not that speaking Arabic resembles breathing in that it is in any way easy or reflexive, no; rather, some collections of its sounds want to _be_ breath. Es-sweera. She could not face the place, and she finds now that saying its name aloud is nearly as bad. “A day in Essaouira,” she repeats, to hurt herself. “It’s not much.”

“Two nights in Essaouira as well.” Helena’s statement is factual, not hot—but Myka’s body can’t help but remember the heat of those two nights. “And some lengths of time in the twilight desert. Did you keep track of those?”

Those words are a challenge, but Myka declines it. “I didn’t think I should. I didn’t think I’d ever see you again. You didn’t seem like someone who’d get addicted to the Gazelles, not like the regulars do. You did it for the reason you did it, or the reason Leena wanted you to do it, I guess. And then it was done.”

“That’s true. I did it for that reason. And then it was done. I thought, for a time afterward, that our ending up in bed together was like that.”

Still so matter-of-fact, the tone she is taking about those deepest of intimacies. “For a time afterward?” Myka asks, trying to focus on that instead.

“I thought I shouldn’t think of you, because we did what we did for a reason—or a suite of reasons—and then it was done. But I did return to thinking of you. Of you, and of how you cared for me. Although I suppose you would have done the same for any wounded animal: you have compassion.”

“You came all the way to Colorado because you think I’m kind to animals?”

“I came all the way to Colorado because I think you were kind to this animal.” What she says next might as well be prefaced with _and I find your attempts at humor unpersuasive_ : “I wondered also if you yourself might be more of a wounded animal than you prefer to let on.”

Myka can’t bring herself to say anything. Because she wants to say no, but she might slip and say yes instead.

“And then there is your lack of sentimentality. Or was it an active rejection of any sentimentality you might otherwise be inclined to express? I would find myself looking up information useless to me. And imagining your voice recounting it as you talked me to sleep: The workings of padlocks. Class divisions in insect societies. A list of Francophone countries. Ottoman sumptuary dictates. Do you know, though, what I found difficult to understand, simply from reading?” Myka shakes her head. “Auto mechanics.”

“The topic? Or the people?”

“Both.” Helena looks her way around the garage, as if this observation might reveal what her reading failed to disclose. Then she directs her gaze back at Myka. “On the topic of the people, I did encounter your friend Driss.”

The thought of him makes Myka forget, for a moment, the strangeness of having Helena in front of her. She smiles: Driss, she can certainly let into the garage. “How is he?”

“He seems quite fine. His hair is every bit as lovely as it was last year—longer, even, and quite glossy. He said, though I’m not entirely certain why he informed me of this, that he has found a new conditioner for it.”

“He overshares. He would’ve loved for you to do the same. Probably even about whatever you use on your hair.”

“Yes. I gathered that. I gathered also that you were unsatisfying in that arena. However, he inquired enthusiastically after you. I told him I intended to try to see you, and he said if I succeeded, I should tell you that despite your failure to divulge les détails—of anything and everything, presumably—he has fond memories of last year.”

“Does he.”

“He seemed quite fond of remembering the way in which you would fix the cars while he turned his attention to the ladies. He was devastated to have no hope for such a congenial and helpful partner this year.” Helena tilts her head. “Did he really have no idea how efficiently you bested him in that arena? And indeed precisely by fixing the cars? Because you must know that watching you do that is not uncompelling.”

“Maybe not as across-the-board appealing as you think,” Myka demurs.

“It certainly worked on me.” She says this with a hint of flirt, but it is entirely pro forma.

Myka says, also pro forma, “I’m not sure that’s exactly what happened.”

“I’m not sure how I became ‘le petit fantôme de Myka,’ either, but apparently that _is_ exactly what happened. I know it, because those words were shouted at me, over a long line of cars being prepped to drive through the desert. That’s how I was made aware that he remembered me.”

That is not pro forma at all. Myka scrabbles for something to say and lands, poorly, on, “He said you looked like a ghost. On account of being so thin.”

“But I was _your_ little ghost.”

“Because we took those walks. He liked to tease me about you. About how—well, about how I—”

“Comment tu me kiffais, according to him,” Helena says, and Myka can’t think of any right posture to take about that. Helena turns stern. “Well, I would certainly hope you had some kiffer-related feelings toward me. If you hadn’t, then you were very untruthful in that hotel room. And I suppose what happened there must have been complete charity on your part.”

“It was not complete charity on my part.” It’s weak, but it’s true.

“Good. And your Driss did make yet another inquiry.”

“Of course he did. What else?”

“As to whether it is in fact the case that toutes les meufs, elles te veulent. Was I simply last year’s primary example?”

Myka blanches, but in the next instant she realizes that Helena is joking. Actually joking. She says, “I think you know that you weren’t any such—”

Helena interrupts with, “What do you do here?”

“Here? I fix cars. What else would I do here?” This gets her a cross of arms and a sigh. “But that _is_ what I do. Mostly. I fix cars. I read books. Watch sports sometimes with my father. Play poker once a month. I don’t know—what else do people do?”

“What about women?”

“What about them?”

Helena raises one eyebrow, and time, or time and therapy, or time and therapy and whatever else she has used to lessen the burden when she can let herself lessen it—it all has made such a difference.

“Now and then,” Myka says. It’s something of an exaggeration. “Not with any consistency.”

“That must be only because you choose it so.” And there’s that deniable jealousy Myka remembers.

Myka asks again, “Why are you here?”

“I wanted to see you. I wanted to see you, and you weren’t there, so I felt I had to come here, to make sure you were all right.”

“There are a lot of ways to see somebody. Technology.”

“I didn’t want to mediate it. Dilute it. It seemed too important for that.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It seemed to make a great deal of sense, two days ago.” She presses her lips together in a brief, reproachful moue. “Less and less, perhaps, as I stand here, but I’m choosing to interpret that as an effect of the jet lag.”

“You’re so…” Myka begins, but she has no idea how to finish.

“So…” Helena prompts.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.” That begins to feel like hyperventilation, so Myka stops herself with, “About you. I don’t know anything about you. And you don’t know anything about me.”

“That is not true, either part. But am I wrong to want to know _more_ about you?”

“Yes. Because you don’t know me. You don’t know me at all.”

“I know that you once thought you were magic, and then found that you were not.”

“Why would you—why would you—” Myka stops herself before she can lose her temper, or start another string of repetition. She backs up, tries again. “I told you, nobody believed it. I didn’t believe it.”

“Of course you did. Everyone believes in magic. They believe until the magic stops working.”

“It always stops working.”

“I know. Parents pray they will be magic, fear they won’t be. I wasn’t.”

“Don’t say things like that.” But Myka’s not sure if, in saying that, she’s trying to keep Helena from disparaging herself or from saying _anything_ like that.

“It’s true. You weren’t either.”

Anything like that. “I know that. I told you. What do you want from me?”

“What do you want me to say? Nothing? Something?” And she steps toward Myka, raises a hand as if to touch her.

That is what it takes, or rather what it _would_ take, to turn this from a conversation, one that Myka hopes she will be able to forget, into something else entirely. “No,” she snaps. “Don’t.” As long as Helena doesn’t touch her, she can pretend she’ll be all right—and maybe this is just another belief in some magic that doesn’t exist, but that’s the line. That’s the line. _In the sand_ , she sneers at herself.

On the other side of that line, there Helena stands, her hand still half-raised. That’s bad enough, but her eyes are worse, and Myka knows why: with her “no,” her “don’t,” she is rejecting precisely what she asked Helena for a year ago. Precisely what she made clear she _wanted_ Helena to choose.

Look at something else. Make your hands do something to keep them from taking hers. Myka turns back to the Cutlass, where before she heard the knock on the door—it feels like years ago, like Helena’s been standing here in the garage for an unimaginably lengthy span of time—she’d just started trying to loosen the pump’s first bolt. She takes her wrench and starts back at it as she talks into the engine. “I can’t give you anything. I told you it took time: waking up every day, learning how to do things right. And right means knowing I don’t have anything to give anybody. So I’m not with anybody. I don’t have kids. I can’t hurt people who don’t exist.”

Helena’s voice behind her becomes louder, closer. “Of course you can hurt people who don’t exist: by forcing them not to exist. You can’t know.”

“You’re going to talk about knowing?” Myka says, still facing the car, still wrenching a bolt that refuses to move. “Okay, I’ll be brutal: I’ll ask you. Knowing how much it hurt, wouldn’t you go back and not have your daughter?”

“That _is_ brutal.” Quieter.

“Never mind.”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t answer. It’s what I told you: you can’t know. And so I would have her—perhaps not if I knew what I know now, but _you can’t know_. So I would not deprive myself, my innocent self, of that joy. I wanted to deprive myself of a future, in the aftermath, but you helped convince me otherwise.”

“You have to try to predict these things.” The bolt finally gives, starts to turn.

“You can’t predict them.”

“I _can_.” Twist, unwind.

“That is insanity. You can no more predict the future than you could magically shield your fellow soldiers from death.”

“Now _you’re_ being brutal.”

“Yes, I am.”

Myka gets the bolt free. “I am not going to talk about this,” she says as she turns and thunks it onto the cart next to the car.

“You’ll talk about it in the Moroccan desert, but not here?”

“That’s right. That’s exactly right. Who do you think you are, coming here?” Saying all these things out loud, here?

“Someone with whom you were once very, very tender. But that was in another country.”

“And everybody’s dead.” Myka gives a violent wrench to the second bolt, and it, at least, doesn’t make the mistake of fighting back.

“I’m not. I thought I ought to be, that I would be happier, but I’m not. And you’re not, no matter how much you think you ought to be. No matter how much you pretend that you are. You were alive in Morocco. Why aren’t you alive here?”

“I am.” Turn, ratchet, turn, ratchet, turn, and that’s the second bolt gone. The pump doesn’t drop loose, though, which means its gasket’s stuck. Of course.

“Lie if you must.”

“What do you want from me?” If Helena would just say it out loud, Myka could turn around, turn her down, and make her go away.

“In fact I want nothing _from_ you. I want something _with_ you.”

_With_ her? Myka yanks the pump free, leaving the engine’s side stringed with residue—thin, stupid, annoying. Complicating an easy job. “You can’t have it.”

“You don’t know what it is. What it might be.”

“I don’t care what it might be. Whatever it is, you can’t have it. Not here.” Myka hates herself, but animals do what they have to, to survive. She turns away from Helena and goes to the rear of the shop, where she grabs a small aerosol can. She watches her boots strike the floor as she walks back to the car.

“Do you think it took nothing for me to come here?” Helena asks. Her voice had held entreaty, supplication, but now, it is empty of any plea; this is exhaustion.

That makes Myka look up again. “I don’t care what it took,” she lies. “Why didn’t you ask me if I wanted you to come here?”

“You might have said no.”

“I would have said no.”

“You see?”

“No. I don’t see at all.”

“I liked the feeling I had when I was with you. And I had an idea that you liked the feeling you had when you were with me, but if I was mistaken, then all right. That isn’t your fault; it’s mine.”

The feeling she had. The feeling she had _then_ , that was—not something she can think about. Now her feeling is of being trapped, here where she should be safe, by this newly present remnant of all that. Here where actions have consequences. Before today, Myka had known how to, or how to try to, ration her memories of those quiet tears and that starved body—starved of food, starved of contact, starved of everything a body should have—Helena’s desert-creature body, and her use of that body on Myka. But is it the same body? If Myka can’t see Helena’s cheekbones as sharply now, then what do her thighs look like, her hips to thighs to knees? Is that formerly stark distance now sturdy and sound?

“The feeling I had. It followed me; it’s always here.” Everywhere, a ghost of a ghost.

“But you pretend it isn’t? Or wait, no—I remember. You don’t pretend. Instead, you just don’t think about it.”

“That’s right. Mostly I try to think about cars. And _things_. Books. A lot of huge old novels where people do everything on a grand scale that doesn’t take any account of people like me. Me or you.”

“Better it should be cars and huge novels than another living person?”

“I can’t hurt cars or huge novels.”

“Why do you fixate on the damage you might do? You could have hurt me. You didn’t.”

“One day. That’s all it was.”

“But that’s how time passes. Whether filled with cars and huge novels, or with sumptuary dictates. Or recitations of patents or the construction of model ships in bottles or anything else. We return from the desert or we don’t. I wish you would.”

“I thought I had.”

“I thought you had as well. I thought I felt a calm in you. Some peace.”

“Some.” But seeing Helena here, now, has changed everything.

“And you shared that with me, through all those hours in the desert. And when you opened that door, just now, when I saw your serious, preoccupied face, I felt it again. Perhaps only because I had traveled so far in order to see it—and I did see it, I did achieve what I set out to do, but—”

“You set out to do a thing and you did it. That should bring you peace. Can’t that be the end of the story?”

“But,” Helena pushes on, “also perhaps because I did want nothing so much as to see that serious, preoccupied face. And to be once again in the presence of the woman who wears it.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” Myka tells her, as if saying it over and over could make it true, could steal back everything she ever did say to Helena, everything she ever revealed.

“I know that no one has ever treated me so gently.”

“That’s something you know about you, not about me.”

“It’s something I know about the two of us together,” Helena says, and Myka thinks of the feel of salt on skin. Then Helena says, with a blunt realism, “But I do understand that I’ve built it up, that little time of us together, built up those nights and that day, read them over and over again, read into them. And what I read—at first, I admit it, I might have thought it was a story about salvation, but instead—a quieter turning point.”

“So did I,” Myka admits. “Read them, I mean. Along with those huge novels, when I couldn’t sleep.”

And when she could sleep and so failed to be on her guard, did she stop reading and dream, about something just like this? But she knows where something like this, where words about tenderness and gentle treatment, could lead, and she knows also that she could not bear having to go back and reread herself as the one in a disheveled bed, saying a red-eyed “thank you” as Helena leaves the room, the country.

So she says, “But it was a story about you. Not about me.” She turns back to the car. Sprays some gasket remover on the offendingly adhesive remains.

She expects Helena to counter this with some patient line of reasoning, but instead Helena asks, “What is it that you are doing?” Her voice is missing an undertone, its hum of intimacy.

Myka tries to empty her own voice. “I’m replacing that fuel pump.” She gestures behind her, to the cart. “And right now I’m softening up this gasket so I can scrape it off. The new one won’t make a seal if the surface isn’t completely clean, and if there’s no seal, there’ll be a fuel leak, and I’ll have to take it all apart and do it again. I hate that. Rather just do it right the first time.”

“Of course you would,” Helena says, and the intimacy is back—but it’s a momentary aberration, for it disappears again. “Well.  Moving on. In Tangier, I went to the Fondouk Chejra, to watch the weavers. The looms were mesmerizing—in themselves, as machinery—as well as for the way the men work with them, throwing the spools back and forth. Like a modern dance of some sort, yet traditional at the same time. Have you been there?” Myka doesn’t know why Helena’s talking about this, but it’s the kind of thing anyone would say to anyone. It’s a terrible relief.

And it’s enough for Myka to feel safe enough to look at Helena again. “For me, Tangier’s always about the cars,” she says. “And then getting everybody to the start. I’ve tried to go, but there’s never been any time.”

“I can attest that if you find you have no interest in the rally, and then there is no seat available on a flight out for a day and a half, Tangier seems to be made of time.” Helena leans down, reaches into her bag. “In any case, the weavers didn’t seem to mind my attention, paltry though it was, at least compared to that of the rich women drivers who played tourist before the rally. I bought you a scarf. I don’t know why I wasn’t decent enough to reciprocate in Essaouira.”

“You reciprocated just fine.” She probably shouldn’t have said that; it’s an intimacy. But it’s about the past, and it keeps the past in the past, and so yes, now, maybe they can just… let this be the end.

Helena doesn’t quite smile, but her cheeks pink: a reminiscence of days in the sun. “Now you’re teasing me.” She raises the folded scarf, hides her face.

“I am. A little.” For what should be the last time: maybe, just a little. A brush of a tassel against a too-sharp cheekbone. Look at how _we_ could play.

“Hm,” Helena says, but she lowers the fabric and shakes it out. “The patterns were so different than those we saw, but I did think the more stark Tangier look might suit you.” It’s a gently milky wool, far enough from white to seem to have been just now shorn from the sheep, with a section of dark green snaking through each end, terminating in a fall of disheveled fringe. “The boy tying the tassels showed me his technique, and even undid one of these—once I’d bought it of course—to let me try. You can no doubt find the incompetent one.” Myka does find it. She touches it, and Helena nods. “The entire thing will most likely unravel, starting there.” She moves as if to hand Myka the scarf, but she changes the motion as she nears, instead looping it around Myka’s neck. In that gesture is the glimmer of how easy everything felt, in a different place and time.

“Helena, what are you doing here?” Myka asks it softly this time.

“Hand-delivering a gift of a defective scarf.” She reaches out and adjusts the scarf such that the faulty tassel is hidden within a fold of wool. “Also, perhaps vainly, I may have wanted you to see a better version of myself. To show you that I had—I don’t know. Taken something to heart.”

Myka regards the other cars in the bays: Alicia’s got a little grape-soda Honda hatchback in hers waiting for a new starter; and Manny’s going to use the early morning to finish up an overall check of a gorgeously restored silky black 1969 Charger. The body shop next door’s supposed to detail it once that’s done, something with flames, but to Myka’s eyes that’s sacrilege on this smooth beauty. She’s working hard at resisting an impulse to offer free oil changes to the showoff who owns it if he’d just leave it alone.

She turns again to Helena. “Better versions,” she says. “Different versions. It’s taken me a long time to get to this point.”

“And what is this point?”

“You know where I am. I told you last year, or I tried to, and I’m telling you now. I fix cars.”

“Yes, I do know that. The first time you said it to me, it seemed noble in its simplicity—the tenth, fifteenth, twentieth, rather less so. It begins to resemble that denial you said it was not. ‘I fix cars.’ That is what you did in the past, that is what you do now, and you seem to have convinced yourself that that is all you’re good for. But here I stand, evidence to the contrary.”

Myka says what she knows is true: “I didn’t fix you.”

“I didn’t say you had. But you were kind to me. Why won’t you let me be kind to you?”

Now Myka says something she hopes is true: “The kindest thing you could do is go away.”

“I don’t believe that. Did what happened last year mean so little to you?”

“That isn’t the point. It isn’t the point at all.”

“You do like a point, don’t you? In fact you like an endpoint. Were you willing to sleep with me because such a state of affairs would not persist? Because you knew your part in the play would end? Two weeks a year in Morocco, that is the run of your little rally drama, and you had become quite the fixture in it. So why not this year?”

“Things change.”

“No. You seem quite determined to ensure that things _not_ change.”

“They do,” Myka says. “I didn’t go.” It’s a stubborn response. Childish.

“You didn’t go, and that’s why I came here. I am not a ghost. I may have seemed to you to be one, but I’m not. Not anymore.”

“Good,” Myka says, and she means it. Helena shouldn’t be a ghost; she’s alive and healthy and she should go away and keep doing the things that have got her to this alive and healthy point. (Myka does like a point.) (And as for an endpoint, better to call it what it is.) “You’re not a ghost, so don’t be one for me. Go back to where you came from.”

At this, Helena offers an incongruous smile, even the first notes of a laugh. “Where I came from. Myka, do you know of the archaeological site Jebel Irhoud?”

If Myka could imagine a path out of the impossibility of Helena standing here in front of her and somehow find a different way through to a possibility of Helena standing somewhere else in front of her, or beside her, or even just near her, somewhere out of time, where all of it and none of it had happened, then “of course,” Myka could say, for they would have already told each other everything, and they would fall onto, or into, a bed so lush as to shame a sultan.

But “no” is all that Myka says now, because she does not know of Jebel Irhoud, and because she cannot imagine her way there or anywhere else.

“It’s approximately two hours inland from Essaouira. If you don’t know of it, then it’s pointless to ask you if you know what’s been found there.”

“Pointless,” Myka echoes.

“Homo sapiens fossils. One hundred thousand years older than any that had been found before. It had been thought that our species arose in Ethiopia, because that was where the previously oldest known fossils came from. Jebel Irhoud opens up three entirely new possibilities.”

“Three?”

Helena holds up her right index finger—a teacherly gesture, on the basis of which Myka realizes that she has no idea what Helena does for a living, that she will most likely never know—and says, “First, that Homo sapiens evolved all over Africa, not merely in the south and east, but in the north and west as well.”

“What’s the second possibility?”

“It isn’t incompatible with the first, actually, or with the idea of Ethiopia as an origin, but: second”—and for that, she uses the index finger of her left hand—“that three hundred thousand years ago, from which the Jebel Irhoud fossils date, we were already widely dispersed throughout Africa, whatever our origins.”

“And third?”

Now Helena raises both palms, offers a little shrug. “It’s been my preferred option, but I’m afraid it hasn’t gained much traction. According to the archaeologists, it partakes of too linear a paradigm, one that they are trying to complicate. I, on the other hand, would rather take it as a simple truth. I think the consequences of accepting it would be complicated enough.”

“But what is it?”

“Just this,” Helena says, low, and Myka still can hear the sand and the sorrow, but also the sea. “We _began_ in Morocco.”

Myka has no words.

“It’s only a possibility. But some archaeologists are considering it. Perhaps you might too.” Helena leans down to her bag again, picks it up, rummages. Takes out a folded sheet of notepaper and hands it to Myka. “This is where I’m staying; it’s near the airport. I have a flight booked to leave late tomorrow—not to be overdramatic, but of course I had no idea if I’d see you, and there was no point in spending time here if I didn’t. Or couldn’t.”

“It’s beautiful here,” Myka chokes out. The scarf is still around her neck, but it’s the piece of paper in her hand that’s making her sweat. Her hand, all-day dirty, has already smeared its exterior, and unbeautiful gray seepage from the mineral oil of the gasket remover coating her fingers may very well destroy whatever is written inside.

Helena says, “I believe you.” She moves forward and kisses Myka’s cheek, her lips barely there, then gone.

And then all of her is gone, and Myka is standing alone, her hand sullying a fold of paper she doesn’t know what to do with, her nervous neck dampening a weave of wool within which Helena has hidden its final, imperfect knot.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 3 tumblr tags: the news of the Jebel Irhoud find was just so providential, and it was too on the nose not to use, what I loved most about how it was reported, was the idea that these ancient Homo sapiens would have looked enough like us that they could walk among us and fit in, EXCEPT they would probably need to wear hats, because their skulls were shaped a little oddly, but these our ancestors were hanging out around campfires in Morocco three hundred thousand years ago, and I find that profoundly moving right now for reasons that are not at all clear to me, P.S. I basically made up the third possibility, nobody thinks that, (except Helena for rhetorical persuasive purposes), (and who knows maybe somebody else in part 4), (we'll see)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes when I’m working on a thing, I caution myself about what not to do. What’s greeted me every time I’ve opened the file that contains this chapter and next one are the words “My worst impulses: happily and uncomplicatedly ever after.” It’s not that I don’t want them to be happy; I do want that. I always want that. But in some contexts, ease is untruthful, and maybe even immoral. Anyway, not that anybody cares, but there’s some strong language in this part. Disclaimering just because. I suppose when you get down to it, I’m writing just because, too.

Ignore a problem long enough, and it eventually goes away. Or it kills you, and Myka would be fine with either of those outcomes.

She doesn’t trust herself to drive home—because she might drive somewhere else instead—so she sleeps in her office at the garage. That’s not so unusual, really, and her body knows how to position itself in her chair so that she can nod off pretty quickly. No matter what’s on her mind.

By the time Alicia and Manny get in the next morning, she’s back at work on the fuel pump. Manny says “hey.” Only under very special circumstances does Manny’s conversation get much more elaborate, or engaged, than “hey.”

Alicia, however, greets Myka with “What’s with all the fresh sealer on that old pump?”

“Long story,” Myka tells her. In terms of actual mechanics, the story isn’t long at all: she’d thought she was installing the new fuel pump, but she had in fact begun to reinstall the old one. She’d got as far as placing the gasket, with sealer all over it, onto the busted pump before her hands started telling her strange things about grit and grime and _new parts don’t feel like this_. So she told herself to focus, started over, and didn’t think about the long story.

She doesn’t think about it now. She pays close attention to the rest of the install, takes a little longer than she otherwise might, but once she’s done, it starts up fine and fires fine, so she parks it out back and calls Wayne, praying she won’t get his wife instead. Mrs. Darnell hates the Cutlass, begrudges the repairs, wants Wayne to trade it in for a Camry because she’s read that they are very reliable. Myka doesn’t bother bringing up anything about Wayne’s driving. Mrs. Darnell also always asks for Myka’s help in making the pro-Camry argument, because “Wayne likes you—he’ll listen to you.” _Wayne doesn’t listen to me_ , Myka would be inclined to tell her. _Nobody listens to me. Even_ I _don’t listen to me._ But she doesn’t bother bringing that up either.

She gets the answering machine. “Wayne, come get your car,” she tells it.

She works her way with great care through the next job, too: replacing a set of worn-out semi-metallic brake pads with new ceramic ones. She would’ve replaced the skinned pads with the same quality product, but she got upsold by the driver rather than the other way around. She’s not going to be an idiot about it; it’s not her job to keep people from going pricier than they need to, not if they’re bound and determined—so, ceramic it is, pal.

People want such unnecessary things. They never believe you, never _listen_ , when you try to tell them that good enough really is good enough.

Up for her after that is a silver Infiniti sedan, only two years old. Pricey car. Powerful. All its owner said when he brought it in was that the check engine light came on, which hadn’t really surprised him because it’d been driving a little hinky.

She plugs in the scanner, reads the error codes. They suggest she should give up on the car completely, send it to auction or junk: everything is wrong. “Everything is wrong” and “driving a little hinky” don’t equate, so she announces to Alicia and Manny, “I’m going to get this out on the road to try to figure out what its problem is.”

“What’d the OBDs say?” Alicia asks.

“Nothing that made any sense. I’ll feel it out, then bring it back and reset the whole thing. See what we get then.”

Manny looks up from under the hood of the pickup truck he’s working on. Myka’s pretty sure that’s the one with the fan-belt issue—but since when is she only _pretty sure_ about such a thing? He lifts the bill of his dark blue Sky Sox hat from his graying head, then pulls it tight back down. Manny doesn’t waste motion much more than he does words, but he picked up the cap-adjusting tic when he pitched in the minors, decades ago. The omnipresent dip lodged behind his lower lip is from baseball too, and he tongues it before he speaks. “You check the gas cap?” he asks Myka.

“Of course,” is her automatic response. A loose cap: it’s the number one cause of weirdo codes. It’s always the first thing you check.

Myka has not in fact checked the gas cap.

“Yeah, okay, no,” she mutters, and she goes to check it.

Myka ascertains that the cap is tight. Then she says to Alicia, who has followed along behind her, “I seem okay to you, right?”

“No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no’? I’m fine.” A foolish response, given that she’s the one who asked the question.

Alicia snorts out a disdainful little breath that suggests she’d agree with “foolish.” She says, “One, you didn’t check the gas cap.” That, she offers with a raised finger that immediately reminds Myka of Helena’s one, two, three archaeological explanations. The memory ambushes her in its fullness, and she doesn’t know whether to congratulate herself or cry at having warded off such detail for this long. Instead of letting herself fall back into that terrifying conversation of last night, instead of letting herself open the folded piece of paper in her pocket, she focuses on how Alicia’s counting off reasons on her _gloved_ fingers—she always wears gloves, to protect her nails, which she gets elaborately done twice a month. Myka and Manny have both been trained to express appropriate awe at the artistry involved, though Manny usually gets away with something on the order of “that looks nice.”

Alicia’s manicure, Alicia’s gloves—Alicia counting on gloved fingers is familiar. Better, Myka tells herself. It’s familiar, and it’s better. It’s familiar, _so_ it’s better. Alicia goes on, “Two, you lied some lie about a long story, first thing this morning.” Myka tries to protest, but Alicia stops her with, “And then three, you took _three hours_ on those pads. I’ve watched you swap out a transmission faster than that. _Watched_ you. I mean it was a manual, but.”

“I remember that. Because I remember you were watching and not helping.”

“I was _timing_. You could’ve broke a record. So you gonna take that Infiniti out and be gone for three hours? Me and Manny just need to know.”

“I don’t need to know,” Manny says. He retreats into the pickup.

“Talk to a customer ever and maybe you might,” Alicia calls to him.

Myka says, “I’ll text you or something, okay? I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“You just said you were gonna try it out and then reset.”

“Right. Look. Like I said, I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“ _You_ look.”

Myka doesn’t want to look. “Okay. A thing happened.”

Totally justified derision: “Wow, yeah. I get why you need to drive around, work that out.”

Totally justified. Myka says, “I’ll ask you, seriously, what would it do to you if somebody came in here and—I don’t know. For you, it’d be like they came in here and reminded you of your ex.”

“Reminded me like came in and said ‘Hey, remember that psycho motherfucker?’” Alicia crosses her arms. She looks very, very tough. She is a very small black woman, one who can look very, very tough—because she _is_ very, very tough. She and Myka have each been through some things, but Alicia’s things have been _personal_. Somebody out to get her _as her_. Myka tries not to forget how different that is.

“Reminded you,” Myka says, “like made you think about things you don’t. Don’t because you shouldn’t, because it’s a better rule.”

“Only thing that’s got a prayer to start that up is that psycho motherfucker himself comes in, which is why I got a restraining order says he can’t.” Alicia pauses. “But I know you got no restraining orders. So the fuck came in here?”

Myka weighs the pros and cons of telling Alicia, of telling anybody; it rings uncomfortably of therapy, which she was bad at, so she’s made it into another thing she doesn’t think about. Then again, talking to Helena last night had had a similar ring, and there’s another full, unavoidable thought: Helena with her determination to make Myka _say things_. And, worse, _think about things_.

She waits too long. Alicia’s posture stiffens, and her jaw takes on a hurt jut. Myka half expects her to start muttering _okay be like that_ or _fine don’t tell me_ like a teenager would. Myka sighs. “It’s a woman. She showed up last night. I hadn’t seen her in a year, but she walked in here last night.”

“A woman who’s a psycho motherfucker like my ex?”

Myka shakes off that suggestion. “Seems to want things I can’t give her.”

“Seems to.”

“Right. She shows up here like I owe her something.”

“Do you?”

Myka can’t immediately say no—even though she doesn’t owe Helena anything, not in any sense she can name. She pushes her dirty hands through her hair. She doesn’t remember taking her hair down, but here it is, down. Jesus. “What do you owe somebody you slept with because she seemed to need it and honestly so did you?”

“If you didn’t get her pregnant, probably nothing. You get her pregnant?”

“Doubtful.” Myka can’t stop a chuckle. “You never know, but doubtful.” She tries to linger on the laugh—tries not to think about a child, and the loss of her, and how that is really the only reason any of this happened.

“She do shit to hurt you? To fuck you up?”

“No. Other than show up here, no.”

“She _know_ that was gonna fuck you up? Twisted like this, where you don’t check a fucking _gas cap_?”

“No.” Because Helena had thought that Myka was in a place better than her own bereaved self—objectively better. A place more whole. Myka wants to laugh.

“So she is not a psycho motherfucker.”

“She came all the way here from Morocco. England then France then Morocco then here. She said it was to see if I was all right. What’s the call on that?”

Alicia makes a “well, well” face. “Hardcore,” she says, and it’s praise. “She a stalker?”

“Technically maybe. But really not. Hardcore, though, yeah.”

“She good in bed?”

Myka is not surprised by this question; Alicia is, in her own way, very like Driss. But Myka’s more inclined to answer when Alicia asks, so: “Yes,” she says. It would be dishonest to say anything else. Because it isn’t just nostalgia that has kept Myka from trying with much enthusiasm to look for any companionship lately—it’s the real and sometimes too inconveniently present knowledge that anybody else would likely pale in comparison. She’s spent some time not being thrilled with that knowledge. “But that happened—not here. Obviously. And she shouldn’t _be_ here. Elsewhere is elsewhere. You know how I feel about… elsewhere.”

“Shit went down, and home is not the place you want to keep all that. I get it. I _live_ it. My kid lives it. But this hardcore stalker who’s good in bed, does _she_ get it?”

Myka doesn’t have an answer.

Alicia takes off her right glove, points her index finger hard at Myka. Its nail features a profusion of delicate daisies that do nothing to sweeten her words. “If she is not a psycho motherfucker then don’t blame her for any psycho motherfucking shit. Am I gonna blame my kid? I gotta bring him with me, no matter what, no matter how much he looks like that psycho motherfucker.”

Myka says, “I don’t like how that fits.” Because Alicia’s son, twelve years old now, does look like her ex, such that Myka has never really understood how Alicia can look at him. Every day. And Myka is now considering that Helena can’t bring her kid with her. And yet she always brings her kid with her. What hurt Helena didn’t happen elsewhere. She doesn’t get to leave it in the desert. Myka’s inability to see that simple fact—to _get to_ it—shames her. “I really don’t like how it fits,” she says.

Alicia shrugs. “Sorry, corporal.” She puts her glove back on.

“Don’t,” Myka says.

“You’re the one brought up my ex. _Reminded_ me. Gotta give you something back.”

“Yeah,” Myka acknowledges. She rubs her eyes. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Yeah. Nobody does. Go drive. Or whatever.”

****

The Infiniti really is acting weird. Codes aside, there’s an overall lack of smoothness to its energy, somehow frantic and sluggish at the same time. Its engine should pick up like nothing’s happening at all, the noise a thick layer of butter in the deep, deep background, but instead there’s a hungry rumble forcing Myka to listen to how much labor it’s chunking, clunking through.

She pushes the pedal, drives even faster than she usually does. Maybe there’ll be a cop around and she can get herself stopped, ticketed, something that holds her up, something she has to deal with.

Instead, she just gets to Helena’s hotel really, really fast. In a car that worked far too hard to get her there.

But Helena’s probably gone already anyway. It’s late afternoon, practically evening, and even though she said she had a late flight, she’s probably gone already anyway. That’s what to hope for.

Myka parks in a space reserved for loading and unloading—maybe somebody’ll raise a stink about it and that can be the thing to deal with. But nothing happens, even after she’s sat there for a while, so she gives up. She gets out of the car, slams its door. The sound is expensive, yet unsatisfying. She goes inside, to the desk, and asks if the person in 327 has checked out yet.

The clerk, a boy who can’t be more than eighteen, gives Myka a look like he’s afraid she’ll strangle him if he gives the wrong answer. He taps at his computer. He says, with a quaver, “No. She hasn’t checked out.”

And what is Myka supposed to do now? Go up there, bang on the door? And then what?

So she mutters a surly “thank you” and goes back to the car. She sits in this expensive, nonsensically faulty car that isn’t hers, in a parking space she has no right to occupy, and she doesn’t drive away.

Thirty-four minutes later, Helena walks out of the hotel, wheeling a suitcase. She stops and waits.

Myka drives up, parks in front of her. Stands up out of the car. “Get in,” she says.

Helena gazes at Myka. Her breathing doesn’t change, and her expression stays neutral. She sounds far more like her desert self as she asks, “Where are we going?”

“To the airport.”

“I’m taking the hotel’s shuttle.”

_Don’t be difficult_ , Myka would tell her, but she knows that she herself is the one being difficult. “Take this instead.”

“My turn now: why are you here?”

“I had to check out why this car was driving hinky.” That’s at least the truth.

“And that made you think of me. I’m flattered.”

“Would you just get in the car.”

“Why?”

“So I can drive you to the airport.”

“In a car that’s likely to break down.”

“It isn’t hinky like that.”

“That is clearly a term of art in your business. As for breaking down, I suppose you would know better than I.” But she gets in the car. She doesn’t look at Myka.

The car doesn’t break down, despite Myka’s roaring unreasonable wish that it would. She has the wild idea that she might pretend it’s stalled, steer it regretfully to the shoulder—but no, it drives like the dream it’s supposed to, creamy sound and all, and it’s only a five-minute trip anyway, and then they’re pulling up to the terminal, and it’s too late. It’s too late for everything.

Myka stops at the curb. She gets out and hauls Helena’s suitcase from the trunk, sets it on the pavement. Pulls up the handle, so Helena won’t have to. Helena’s out now, too, and she says, “The car didn’t break down. You were right.”

“Yeah.” She’s caught between wanting to memorize Helena’s face as she stands here, every strengthened detail of it as it is now, or to cling tighter to the past vision of thin grief. Neither one is going to be a comfort. (Neither one is going to recede.)

“May I kiss you?” Helena asks, and it’s her desert voice again. So wrong for it to emerge from this rejuvenated body. “Just once, just goodbye?”

The car decided to get here. That made clear what her answer has to be. “No,” Myka says.

Helena nods. She takes the bag’s handle, and she turns to walk into the terminal. The scarf, that Essaouira scarf, is around her neck and shoulders, like an animal, there to serve her, to protect her, as a familiar should. That, Myka did right. She reaches out to reassure herself of its nubbled weave, to flip it one last time between her fingers. One little last physical reminder of all those colors, all that beauty Myka couldn’t bring herself to face. It’s in her hand for an instant, and then it’s slipping out, as Helena moves away.

_Tighten your grip_.

Where the directive comes from doesn’t matter; it’s an order and Myka obeys it.

Helena turns around.

And she’s launching herself at Myka as she had at the end of the race last year, as if her body is spent but she’s _won_ something.

They embrace like it’s first and new—and the first kiss still feels like this—but then again it _is_ first and new: it’s their first kiss goodbye.

Helena holds her eyes closed for a moment after it ends. She looks, in that instant, like she’s asleep—sleep, that beautiful time, when if there are no dreams, there are no memories either. That’s the only real peace, that and the instant of waking, that one instant when everything is forgotten and fine.

How close to forgotten and fine it all had seemed, just now, when Myka was kissing Helena; how it had become no longer so when she opened her own eyes from the kiss. And she watches as Helena, too, now, when the instant of waking passes, takes upon her face again all of that remembered weight. _Kiss me again_ , Myka imagines saying. _It helps me, and it helps you, so kiss me again_.

But trying to escape into a world of dreamless sleep: that’s cheating. So instead, she says, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“For what?” Helena’s voice is as soft as the kiss.

_For wishing, when I knew I shouldn’t._ “For all of it. Not being as right as I pretended to be. Not being the same person here as I was there. Not being someone who could give you what you want.”

“What do I want?”

“That person in Morocco. That person there.” Because that person, there, did the right things, at the right times.

“Yes, that person, _there_. There, then. But if I’m not the same now, here, why would I expect you to be?”

“It was so beautiful,” Myka tries to explain. Tries to explain _away_. “So differently beautiful. That could never happen again.”

“No, it couldn’t. I for one don’t wish to be in need like that again.” Her words bring Myka dangerously near tears, because of course Helena doesn’t want that. All Myka wants to do is crawl back to Essaouira, back inside that differently beautiful sanctum of time and place—but she would have to drag Helena back with her, and she would not drag Helena back into that exile, not for all the world. (And yet it feels like all the world, that’s what she’d be getting back, for that moment; she’d be getting all the world.) “But Myka,” Helena says, and it’s a strange side-stepped reading of Myka’s mind she performs as she goes on, “you are still in the world, and no matter where in the world that is—no matter what you tell yourself about who you are in different places—no matter what you want to leave in this place or in that one—no matter any of that—you wear the same face.”

“This isn’t _your_ face. It isn’t the same. You look _better_ now.”

“And you speak with the same voice.”

“Even your voice is different.”

“You are still in the world, and so I did not have to resign myself to the loss of your face. To the loss of your voice. I could come here, and I could see you and hear you. You could still tell me things. Or did you forget them all?”

All Myka can manage is a shake of her head.

“Then tell me this: Why should I mourn the loss of you when here you stand? Would you wish more such grief upon me?”

“Wish grief on you? How can you say that? Why would you say that?” Here she is near crying again, this time from frustration.

“Myka.” That voice, saying her name, low and terse. But there’s a keen tension to it now too. “If I were to continue explaining myself to you, I would miss my plane.”

Myka recognizes that carefully articulated statement for what it is: one last chance. Myka can take this one last chance to keep being who she’s been. That person would let Helena walk away, into that terminal lit up from the inside, into all that light. It’s waiting for her.

That person would stay out here, in this mountain twilight, and let Helena walk into whatever future she can find.

She’ll go away, and Myka won’t see her again, because there are things she doesn’t think about. She will put Helena fully away, with those things she doesn’t think about, as she should have done before. Another thing that Myka will put away, with those things, is the fact that Helena tried—folded with the fact, plain in Helena’s gaze now, that she will not try again.

(We all have one grand gesture in us.)

This won’t ever happen again. Something else might happen, but it wouldn’t be this. A thousand other things will happen, but they won’t be this.

“Would you?” Myka asks.

It’s the second-most selfish question she’s ever asked. The most selfish was when her first tour was almost up, and she had to decide whether to extend. Her mother was unwell, and she asked her parents, “Do you need me stateside?”, knowing that they would say yes, knowing that that would be her excuse. To get out from under the pressure of being magic: to escape that pressure, she selfishly asked a question. The asking diminished her, both in her own eyes and in those of her parents. They were, they are, unselfish people. They never would have thought to request that she come home.

A wince of a question, yet she asks it. “Would you?”

Helena moves closer, but in a sidle, like she has to stay balanced to dart away, like this is surely the most obvious of traps. She moves closer still, and Myka raises her arms, just a little, but as much as she can.

And it seems like a miracle, but really it’s just two bodies coming soft together one more time, with cars and people all around, suitcases and goodbyes, but this kiss is like those that were a year ago—like those that were not first, a year ago; like those that were instead deep inside two differently beautiful nights, in a country not their own.

If it were just this, everything would be all right, and nobody would ever hurt anybody, because Myka is thinking of every intimate touch. How her legs would slide against Helena’s. How her cheek would rest against Helena’s hip. How her hands would rise up Helena’s back.

Myka finds herself starting the car and driving. She is driving somewhere, anywhere. Helena is beside her in a car on the road, instead of beside a stranger on an airplane in the sky, and Myka is driving somewhere.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 4 tumblr tags: this part was going to take us to a later point in the story, but I felt this as a more natural break, plus this means that it has emerged a tiny bit sooner that it would have otherwise, I know I'm glacial, (maybe climate change will cause a Delaware-sized piece of me to break off), (although I really don't have that much self to spare), but I feel so strongly about the things that are being dealt with here, that I want to get it a little bit right, plus cars' innards are unexpectedly fascinating, (I realize it's my problem and not yours that I've spent far too much time on the intricacies of engine knock)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lixiviation is a process in which a solvent is applied to a solid mixture in order to extract the soluble part of that mixture; your goal might be to obtain the soluble part, which dissolves in the solvent, or the leftover insoluble part. Percolation and leaching refer to the same thing, but I like “lixiviation,” as a word, because it evokes its Latin root, which is related to liquid and liquidity—different connotations than the other two. Anyway, it’s a useful metaphor in lots of contexts, and I tried for a while to use it in this part. I tried to get a lot of different ideas to work here, and most of them didn’t. What survived all the cuts may not work either, but I’ve spent way too much time already on the succession of minutes that make up this part. Anyway, if you feel like it, keep lixiviation in the back of your mind.

They aren’t ten minutes from the airport when the engine hinks out a warning, a rumble that Myka registers but doesn’t process. Then it coughs, gently, a little artful Victorian consumptive pant, as if into an embroidered handkerchief. Then it stops entirely.

In general, Myka tries not to swear. That belongs elsewhere too. But when she has got the Infiniti on the side of the highway, when she has got it stopped and safe and she is sitting there capable of only the barest rational thought, she utters a purposeful “what the _amen_ fuck.”

She’d had a sergeant, late in her second tour, use that as his daily morning hail, the pronunciation leaving no doubt about his Alabama roots, right down to the _ay_ -men. The proper response had been “Great day to be an American.” No matter what that morning was the morning-after of.

Helena does not give the proper response. Instead, she reaches over and takes Myka’s hand. “You were right,” she says.

“Are you trying to be funny? It broke down.”

“Not about that.” She nods at the jagged horizon. “You said it’s beautiful here, and you’re right.”

The sun idles behind the mountains, changing them to volcanoes.

Myka says, “So many different sunsets. For us, I mean. Desert, beach, mountains.”

Helena doesn’t say anything. She holds Myka’s hand until the fire in front of them fades.

****

In response to a text from Myka, Alicia arrives in the tow truck. It takes her a beat to notice Helena emerging from the sedan, but Myka can mark the exact moment of that noticing, because Alicia whistles. Then she says, to Myka’s mortification, “I bet you’re Myka’s hardcore stalker who’s good in bed.”

Helena turns to Myka and demands, “Do you _collect_ oversharers?” She then focuses on Alicia. “And what conditioner do you use on _your_ hair?”

“I don’t think it would work for you.” But Alicia’s eyes take on a little squint of calculation, and she raises a hand like she might be going to take her glove off and test that dark gloss.

It’s ridiculous: it’s only the _idea_ of someone else—and Alicia, at that, Alicia who has no interest—touching Helena’s hair. That’s all it is, and as something that provokes a bodily awakening, it’s certainly no “tale of asking other women for sunscreen.” But Myka is mortified again: one sting of that idea, and now some itchy carnal toxin is perfusing its way through every one of her vessels and veins.

Helena seems oblivious to Myka’s distress; she is busy telling Alicia, with odd regret, “That is most likely true. But I will say that your braids are lovely.”

“Hey, Myka, your hardcore stalker says my braids are lovely. _You_ could notice, once in a while.”

“I’m not listening to either one of you,” Myka maintains, to cover this embarrassing onset. “I’m hooking up the tow.”

Alicia tells Helena, “She loves to hook up the tow—the wheel brackets. She’s not a cute person, right? But it’s the cutest thing.”

Helena says, “It certainly seems idiosyncratic.” She moves, with apparent disapproval, to stand over Myka.

Myka maneuvers the brackets into place around the passenger-side front tire and tries not to react, other than to say, to the tire, “I like hydraulics. Leave me alone.”

“I like _you_. And I don’t believe I will leave you alone.”

Alicia, leaning against the truck, watching and not helping, says to Myka, “This is not the kind of girl I thought you’d be into.”

“This is not the girl I was originally into,” Myka tells the tire.

“You aren’t the girl I was originally into either,” Helena points out.

Myka points out right back, “You weren’t originally into me at all.” She stands up. Keeps looking down at the tire, now bracket-ensconced.

“That’s true,” Helena says.

Alicia remarks, “That part I get.”

But as Alicia speaks, Helena murmurs to Myka, “and I’m sorry for that,” and then she is pulling Myka toward her into a kiss, one that Myka is astonished to find herself first not warding off, then not stepping out of. This touch of lips is new, softer, like Helena knows that the kiss is a surprise and so is Myka’s stunned willingness to participate in it. Like Helena is in fact stealing the kiss, from whatever version of Myka would not have volunteered it. The kiss has the additional surprising effect of both stoking the want and making it easier to bear—and it is as if Helena knows that too.

As Myka regains her awareness of a world that is not Helena’s mouth on hers, Alicia is shaking her head and saying “…during that blizzard in ’97”—no doubt a pronouncement on this unprecedented sight. Unprecedented, like a three-feet-of-snow-in-twenty-four-hours blizzard in anybody’s lifetime. And everybody knows what everybody was doing during that blizzard in ’97, thanks to the baby boom nine months later.

Alicia drives the truck back. Helena sits next to her, in the middle of the bench seat, and they have a detailed discussion of how careful Alicia has to be about her nails, even with the gloves. “Not like Myka. She’d just reach in and yank a plug,” Alicia says, and Helena responds, “I’m sure she would.”

Myka sits scrunched up against the passenger-side window and watches her breath fog the glass.

At the garage, everything is routine, but for the shine that Helena’s presence lends to it all. Myka and Alicia let the car down and untether it—and Alicia seems to delight in explaining each step to Helena as they accomplish it. Inside, Manny is still there, and “Manny, this is Helena,” Myka says, like she was always going to be saying that today. Manny takes a step away from the SUV in his bay, but before he approaches, he empties his mouth of tobacco. Myka finds this unexpectedly moving. Courtly, despite the fact that he leaves his hat on as he shakes Helena’s hand and says “hey.”

He and Alicia leave soon after that, which they must have been getting ready to do even as Myka was sending her “need a tow” text. That means Manny waited on purpose for them—and that seems courtly too, even though Myka would bet it happened because Alicia spent some time telling him a story titled “Here’s Why Myka Forgot to Check That Gas Cap.” Manny likes to pretend he doesn’t have a curious bone in his body, but he grew up on telenovelas—he appreciates a plot twist. Those usually happen in Alicia’s life, though, and Myka’s not sure how to feel about taking the starring role in this particular episode.

Alicia, on her way out, says to Helena, “Hasta, stalker.” These gleeful words make Manny run through the fuller version of the cap tic: hat off, other hand through gray buzz cut, hat on. It’s not a laugh, but it’s close.

“They seem very nice,” Helena says when she and Myka are alone.

“They’re good with the cars,” Myka says. Dispassionate, even as her blood is beating _alone alone alone_.

“That’s delightful to know. They also seem very nice.”

“Yeah. Manny basically couldn’t care less—well, not out loud—and Alicia’s an oversharer, like you said. But yeah.” Myka starts her closing-up ritual: checking locks, storing supplies. Placing tagged keys on hooks. Double-checking each tag. She is aware enough to know that she is keeping herself, and most importantly her hands, busy—a cousin, she thinks, of Helena’s year-ago physical indecision.

“What happens now?” Helena asks.

What Myka should say is, “Now I fix a car,” because she’s got one right there in the back, broken in some way she could expend a lot of effort diagnosing. A lot of hands-busy time. What Myka does say is, “Well, you checked out of your hotel. And you missed your plane. So I guess you’re coming home with me.” The right attitude to take toward that might be joy, or it might be terror, but Myka hews, in the moment, to pragmatism: Helena _is_ coming home with her. It’s a fact like any other fact.

Nothing dramatic happens when they do get to Myka’s house, though Myka spends the entire drive—in her own truck, which thank god is making its right sound—expecting a lightning strike, or an overturned semi releasing terrified chickens onto the roadway, or some other sign. She wouldn’t be able to interpret it, but it would at least be a sign. Instead, she finds herself carrying Helena’s roller bag inside. Finds herself turning around to be startled by Helena here in this space, exotic against a background long faded to drab.

Finds herself asking, “Have you had anything to eat?” When Helena shakes her head, Myka says, “You should eat. I’ll heat something up.” Wear sunscreen, eat food. Look for animal tracks, call me if the car breaks, get some sleep, rehydrate. If she is handing out shoulds? Then she herself should stop telling Helena what to do. Should have stopped a year ago. Should have kept from starting. “But only if you want me to,” she amends.

“That would be fine,” Helena says.

So Myka’s hands get to be busy again, now with a pan, the stove, bowls, because the best she has on hand is turkey soup in Tupperware in the refrigerator. Farther from Essaouira she could not get.

They eat together, and they drink beer, because that and diet soda are all Myka has, and Helena says she doesn’t prefer soda. She says it just that way: “I don’t prefer soda.”

That’s how it goes, like anybody’s evening at home, one in which they dwell on banalities that they had no time for—that were irrelevant—in north Africa. Helena doesn’t prefer soda. Myka crumbles saltine crackers into her soup, and Helena judges this both charming and barbarous. They discover that they have been taught wildly divergent “proper” ways of utilizing soup spoons.

Myka has no idea whether she is on fire or under anesthesia.

“This is quite good,” Helena says, setting down her spoon. “Did you make it?”

“No. Manny did.”

Helena’s head tilts. “Manny makes your food?”

“Not just Manny. Do you know why I fix cars?”

“Because you enjoy it? You seem to enjoy it.”

“I do. But also,” and Myka accepted long ago that she would always be admitting this, or demonstrating it, “I’m terrible at everything else.”

“Everything?”

That question drags in its wake a languid aspect that Myka begins to bend toward, but she says, “Just about.”

“So other people make your food for you.”

“Not always. I don’t ask them to. Manny for example tends to make extra. Since his wife left.”

Helena’s head moves—another tilt. A question.

“It’s not a story,” Myka tells her. “It’s just what happened.”

And Helena’s head moves once again, like she might pursue it, but instead she nods a _such things happen_ nod. She looks into her bowl.

Myka asks, “Was that enough? Are you still hungry?”

“That was fine.”

Myka could stand up and busy her hands again: clear the table, wash the dishes, re-Tupperware the soup that remains in the pot. But sitting at this table, sharing these trivia, has created a thickness between them, something so substantial that dust might settle on it. Movement might frighten it away, so instead, Myka asks, “Do we need to… talk?”

“We talked a great deal yesterday.”

“We did.”

“Do you know what I realized? During that great deal of talking yesterday?”

“I honestly can’t”—Helena’s hand reaches out to hers, through the heaviness, and of course that’s the one right movement, a stroke of thin skin on thin skin, light and cool and interrupting. “Can’t. Can’t imagine,” she finishes.

“Your voice differs slightly from my memory of it.”

“So it wasn’t me telling you all those things anyway?”

“Perhaps that was sea-level you,” Helena says, and the words might be a joke, but her tone does not reveal it.

Myka swallows a low laugh anyway. “You think it’s the altitude?”

“Sea-level you then. Mile-high you now.” She smiles a sly little curve, like she’s caught Myka in the difference.

“We’re higher than that,” Myka informs her.

“Are we?” Helena asks. She stands and walks around the table, as if Myka has said “come here.” She offers her hand to Myka and pulls her up out of the chair, and then they are standing together, as they might have done a year ago, but now they are regarding each other, no desert or shoreline in sight. No sunset with its impersonal, grand beauty is here to take on any of the weight. There is only Helena, beauty nearly as grand but concentrated, sending Myka wishes-and-wants higher, proximity-and-pheromones deeper, and her bedroom is down the hall. Her head is light, and her body is heavy. High and low, she could pull on this hand holding hers, pull hard, all the way down the hall.

Could. Should? “What if this”—and Myka first intends “this” to mean this thick and thin thing between them, intends to ask something like “isn’t real?”, but she changes her mind, pushes the question in a different direction, two different directions, toward and away from that room down the hall and all its consequences—“is the worst thing we could do?”

“Then you need to take me back to the airport. Right now.” The pressure of her hand on Myka’s doesn’t change, but whatever meaning this hold of a hand conveys is expanding.

Myka raises the hand that Helena is not holding and touches the scarf, still doing its job, still protecting. “There aren’t any flights out, this time of night,” she says.

“So what you are saying is that it is too late.”

Decisions, and when we make them. What we make them _about_. “What did you really come here for?”

“To find out. To see.” She sighs, and Myka would ask “see what?”, but Helena is already going on, “See whether any of it was real.” She is a mind-reader. “A year ago I could see nothing through my grief. Only vague outlines: you said it yourself, that I wasn’t present. I looked on as someone else acted.”

This hurts Myka in a way she doesn’t want to examine but can’t quite turn away from. “Even when we—” she starts, and she might be trying to twist a knife deeper into herself.

Helena interrupts, again reaching into Myka’s thoughts, “Except for my wanting you, when I hadn’t wanted anything. The terror of it.”

Terror—and Myka is reminded of Helena’s “Do you think it took nothing for me to come here?” from last night, how much all of this has to have cost Helena, every step, every choice. “You came here anyway,” Myka says.

“I did.” She smiles, eyes and all. “And here I stand with you, rewarded. Incidentally, you should know that I was telling you the truth last night as well. About my motives: I did want to make sure you were all right.”

Myka moves her hand up from the scarf to Helena’s hair. Its length embraces her fingers; her blood jumps. And that is very real. “I can be. When I can look to the next minute and see that it’s taken care of, that it isn’t going to be a disaster.”

“Let me take care of the next minute. It will be no disaster. Please, let me.”

The next minute is slow and strange, like some dream of a year ago: Helena is touching Myka’s clothing, manipulating its surfaces with those familiarly busy hands, but it is present-Helena doing so, here in this wrong, dream-weird space. In the real, year-ago version, Myka had taken these actions as signifying only hesitancy, but now, with what might be dream-logic, she rereads them: then and now, these movements were, these movements are, Helena making sure of something she already knew, already knows. Not occupying or distracting herself; instead, readying herself.

Helena leans to Myka’s ear. “I can feel your body thinking. Under my hands. About the next minute?”

“About you. About everything I got wrong.” About how many times she has had to double back, on Helena’s tracks and her own.

In answer, Helena kisses her, a taste high and bright, and that is the next minute. And the next: Helena says, low and grounding, “Not wrong. Not always right, but not wrong.”

And so to the next minute, and the ones after that, as Myka begins to uncover the answers to her questions about Helena’s present body, encouraged by Helena’s own hands. She takes the beautiful opportunity to remove that protective scarf, to begin to navigate terrain that is both familiar and new—terrain that is always both familiar and new. Bodies share features, processes, but each body differs from every other, and each body differs from itself, from one minute to the next. Sickness, health. Age. Reconstructing all the differences that have come before, via traces: wrists, once starved to sticks, rarely rethicken; skin etches itself with straiae to document the swell that accommodates new life. The body records. For future reference.

All that is written on Myka’s outer body is a scar at the top of her right biceps. The buried, mutating evidence of repeated sunburns will no doubt unearth itself over time, but for now, that scar is her only physical testament of what happened. It is so small. Two inches long. Insufficient. Embarrassing.

Helena had kissed that scar, a year ago, and Myka had thought it accidental—her lips were everywhere, so there too. But now she kisses it deliberately, as if reuniting with a friend.

Myka’s entire body is reinterpreting Helena’s year-ago actions, down to the tight grip of her arm, relentless now as it was then. How could she have failed to know, then, that Helena was driving some new magic into being?

It’s Myka’s turn, this time, to break against Helena, and it’s not at all poetic; there’s no moving ocean outside the window to show her how. Yet Helena smiles as it happens, and all Myka can find as a response to this new, unbounded smile is some echo of last night’s stupefied _you are saying so many words_.

A thousand other things will happen, but they won’t be this.

But what is _this_?

This is a physical process that is just like any other, for human bodies are nothing but engines. In place of intake, compression, power, exhaust, over and over, here presynaptic terminals are stimulated, motor neurons release acetylcholine, myofilaments slide, muscle fibers contract.

This is a physical process that is unlike any other, for it transubstantiates all of the body’s details and systems and signals into a philosophy—a verb that connects I and you.

This is a physical process that Myka fears the labor of turning back into details and systems and signals. Numbered instructions and lists. Neurons, acetylcholine, myofilaments.

For she can see the next minute, and the next, and the thought of exiling herself from such new beauty is intolerable. But even as she is inside those minutes, she is outside them, asking _what about the hours?_ Will there be empty future hours, hours that she will have to relearn how to fill, now that Helena has come inside and lain here and smiled?

In the middle of the night:

Myka opens her eyes, unsure whether her breath is moving out or in. Or at all.

“…new clothes,” her ear feels a voice—a real voice, Helena’s voice—say. Her shoulder recognizes the stroke of a real hand, Helena’s hand. Down, up, down, up, down, up: a palliative repetition.

“What,” Myka rasps, her throat arid.

“You were making noises. Straining to speak,” Helena says. “Forget that dream, whatever it was. Forget it and sleep.” The drag of her hand resumes. “The little match girl. The princess and the pea, the red shoes. The snow queen.” She pauses. “The steadfast tin soldier.” She pauses again. “The story of a mother.” She breathes. “The fir-tree. Thumbelina. The ugly duckling. The nightingale.”

The nightingale; its song. An Emperor’s tears. The real bird displaced by one mechanical, predictable. Yet when the Emperor languishes, only the song of the real sways Death to surrender his prize and depart.

In the morning:

Myka watches as Helena awakens. Her opening eyes are not at all red. Against the white of Myka’s own sheets, her skin is pale and uniform, as if the sun now chooses to shine upon both sides of her—all of her—with equal, respectful delicacy.

Myka lets her hands impersonate the sun.

The next minute. And the next.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 5 tumblr tags: when a person is so sure that she has been doing the right thing, and that she has been doing that thing for the right reasons, one way to upset that applecart, is to put her in a lady or the tiger situation, in which it isn't clear which is the lady and which is the tiger, or maybe each option is both the lady and the tiger, but anyway a story is supposed to be about change, which I guess I tend to think takes the form of, spilling the contents of a very carefully packed box, all over everywhere


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I said when I was posting this on Tumblr: I thought I had this part finished at a certain point. Like done, locked, and I was just doing the final copyedit… but it didn’t feel right. So I started a new draft, and here’s how it ended up. It’s ironic, or maybe just stupidly appropriate, that I had to back up and take another, um, route. Also my car was in the shop, though I swear what was wrong with it was unrelated to any of the things in this story. Well, okay, not completely unrelated, given that it’s, you know, a car. And actually even less unrelated than that, now that I think about it, given that the problem was with the starter. Anyway, this is the end of the, ahem, road. (Sorry.)

One year later

It’s a long walk to get away from a several-thousand-person tent city, if you want some true desert peace. It’s a walk that stretches, stretches long, when you aren’t following any footsteps, when you’re just walking toward silence, not sure of when you’ll find its fullness.

Myka likes to take this walk. This year, she’s particularly liked to take it, and she’s done so, every evening as night has faded the day, before the cars have demanded her attention.

She has breathed in the stillness, breathed it out, let the weight, and the wait, settle on her. She would not have believed, not years ago, not even _a_ year ago, that the desert could sit this gentle—or rather, that its heaviness could sit to the side. Present, but a sleeping animal. Settled in for the night.

****

Helena had left Colorado Springs after far too few days, but she had said she would come back. She needed to work out precisely when, she said—she was not in fact a teacher, Myka learned; instead she somehow facilitated international movements of money—but she had promised she would. “If only for a long weekend to start,” she’d said, but she had promised.

Myka had let her simple happiness at the idea have its way.

She told herself later that the difficulty they had in working out that “precisely when” should have raised a flag. Should have. Didn’t, because Myka was listening to Helena’s voice on a telephone and wrapping herself up in it, wishing the body that voice belonged to were present to be wrapped up in as well. Helena proposed a date first, but Myka said, “No, that’s right before Labor Day weekend, and my dad and I are going to a car show down in Alamosa.”

“I’ve never been to a car show. Couldn’t I go with you?”

Myka considered that for a second, but she said, “Not quite yet on that with Dad. If that’s okay.”

“Of course it is.”

And it did seem okay—the temperature of Helena’s voice had not changed—so Myka said, though she had not planned to say it, “I’ll come to you instead. To make up for it. The next weekend after, what about that?” When Helena didn’t immediately say yes or no, Myka hadn’t thought anything of it. _Anything_. Anything at all. She went on, “If you’ve got something to do then, it’s all right. I understand.”

That had been followed by yet another pause. But then Helena said, “I don’t have anything to do. It’s a date on the calendar, isn’t it.” Before Myka could say anything, Helena went on, “So buy a plane ticket. Or I’ll buy one for you.”

“It doesn’t matter who buys,” Myka told her. “This won’t be the only plane ticket, so it doesn’t matter.” She’d felt a little silly, how fervent she must have sounded, but Helena’s “yes” in response seemed equally so.

And in the subsequent rush of information regarding arrivals and departures and fares and layovers and seat assignments, Helena’s pauses, and any significance they might have had, migrated to a noninstrumental holding space in Myka’s head. The instrumental spaces were busy anyway, working hard to redefine Myka as someone who told someone else, with regularity, about her days. Who heard about that someone else’s days. Who felt a little heart-leap at a particular ring on the telephone. Who marveled at the warmth of the voice that greeted her, the voice that always at some point asked, “And what sorts of cars did you fix today?”

Helena would learn about Escapes and Accords, Quests and Sonatas. Myka would in turn hear of dollars, euros, yen, rubles. Rupees, kroner. Dirhams—or _darahim_ , Helena would sometimes say, the Arabic plural. Her voice would dip low, quiet. Anything to do with Morocco, she said soft. They both said soft.

On the day before Myka was to leave for London, right as she and Alicia and Manny were starting to get everything squared away to close up the shop, as Myka was asking them yet again “and you’re sure you’ve got everything under control? because I’m sure I could put this off, if I need to,” as Alicia was threatening “Manny’s still got that arm could probably _pitch_ you halfway there and I’ll make him do it nevermind his rotator cuff,” Myka’s phone buzzed. A text. From Helena, and so the heart-leap.

“I can’t,” it read.

Six in the evening in Colorado was one in the morning in London. Myka texted back: “Can’t what? Sleep?”

She waited. No response.

And so she texted again: “Seriously, what can’t you do?”

No response.

Her thumbs shook a little as she typed, “Are you okay?”

It was one in the morning, but she called. No answer—and Helena’s phone wasn’t off; it rang and rang before going to voicemail. Myka left a worried message—“Please let me know you’re all right”—and waited. Nothing.

“What does this mean?” she asked Alicia. “Is it a brushoff? Am I supposed to not go?”

“How should I know what you’re supposed to do?”

“But what if that’s what it is? What if I go, and then that’s what it is?” What if what if what if.

“Then I bet they got planes fly this direction too. Remember, though, _she_ stalked _you_.”

“You want _me_ to stalk _her_? But how do I even—I mean what would I even _do_ —”

“You know what? From now on my mouth is _shut_ , ’cause I don’t want you to do nothing but leave me out of it.”

Myka said, “I don’t know what to do. What do I do? This is what I was afraid would happen.” But it wasn’t at all what she had been afraid would happen. Not at all. She was trying not to let herself settle into her immediate thought, that this was the least damaging way it could end, with her just not getting on a plane. The least damaging.

Alicia was taking off her gloves, paying far more careful attention to her manicure than to Myka. “What’d I just say? I look like your therapist? Your pastor? Maybe if I’m your sponsor I tell you to go to a meeting, but I don’t know which church basement hardcore stalkers anonymous meets in. You two are messed up. Do me and Manny both a favor and go find out if you keep being messed up together or what.”

And it was true: Alicia was not Myka’s therapist, or pastor, or thank god sponsor, because Myka thank god hadn’t needed a sponsor for anything, but thank god there wasn’t really any hardcore stalkers anonymous, because she might have gone to that meeting. That night, she might have gone.

But there was no meeting. So after a night that was probably always going to have been sleepless—but that Myka had never expected to be filled with unanswered texts and calls, with the anxiety of this incomprehension rising higher and higher—she went to the garage. Four in the morning, and she would have had to be at the airport in four hours. She got under the hood of a Ford Escort station wagon.

Manny had shown up at seven. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” Myka told him. “Working on this Escort.”

“With the cracked insert, that one valve?”

“Yeah.”

“It beat up the piston bad as you thought?”

“Yeah.”

“You gonna fix it in half a hour?”

“Probably not.”

“Leave it for Bobby. Needs to try a job like that.” He paused. Tongued his lip. “You leaving straight from here?” Myka didn’t answer. “You got your stuff with you? In the truck?”

She shook her head.

“Better speed good on your way home then. To the airport too.” He handed her a full paper bag. “Don’t starve.” And Myka would have turned to go, but he was working on some more words. He put his hand on her shoulder. “Remember, some people. They don’t know what to say.”

That hand felt like a full-body embrace. So Myka responded, “I know what to say. I’m saying if Bobby blows that piston job, he’ll hear about it from me for the rest of his natural life. And so will you.”

Manny’s hand went to his hat. His full bottom lip curved up. “Yeah,” he said.

The trip was fourteen hours. Plane, layover, plane, layover. So much sitting. So much waiting. So little information about what she might be walking into. She went back through all the texts she and Helena had sent each other, since April, all the emails, tried to reconstruct all their phone conversations. Something was knocking at her, but she couldn’t isolate it. Couldn’t diagnose it.

On the last and longest flight, the one to London, she fell into and out of a doze, one in which she did the piston replacement over and over and over in her head, trying to send it telepathically to Bobby. The mangled piston wasn’t even the source of the problem, poor thing; the valve insert had cracked, come loose, and destroyed it… not the piston’s fault…

As she emerged from passport control at Heathrow, she searched the throng for dark hair, for familiar eyes. She was grateful that she could, for she knew plenty of people who couldn’t take too many bodies in a space anymore. Having to pay attention to that much movement, sorting out all the purposes behind all those strides and turns and gestures, meant no safety.

Myka was grateful. But she also knew plenty of people who had been fine—who had thought they knew where safety was—but then, after a while, weren’t. Didn’t.

All she’d done was fix cars, though. She tried to remind and convince herself of this, of the fact that what had happened to her was smaller than, and thus different from, what had happened to other people.

She sat down. Tried to manufacture some clarity on whether to go upstairs to the ticket counters and start getting herself back to Colorado.

But even as she sat there, her eyes still picking through the crowd, stopping briefly on any dark hair, on any wisp of a womanly body… even as she sat and looked and tried to decide, the knock began to resolve: “It’s a date on a calendar,” Helena had said.

The difference between what had happened to her and what had happened to other people. Other people in the service—but also, other people, such as Helena. Because what happened to Myka didn’t have anything to do with a date on a calendar. But what happened to Helena did.

The taxi ride was a blur in which she texted and called again and again—“I know, I know now, I didn’t understand before and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry”—and then she was standing on a front stoop, hammering on a door, and Helena had to be there, she _had to be_ , because Myka didn’t know exactly when, during that taxi ride or at any point before, she had decided she could not tolerate the idea of never seeing Helena’s face again, never hearing her voice, but that decision had been made.

“I will not accept this,” she shouted. “You came to Colorado to show me that there were consequences—and now I’m here to show you the same thing. Open this door!”

Nothing. She sat down on the stoop, her back to the door. Exhausted, desolate. Thinking about the date on the calendar.

She might have fallen asleep, right there on the cold stone steps. Might have, because the door creaked behind her, and surely that was a dream. She stood up, though. Turned around. Saw a face just as hollowed as the one she’d grown accustomed to in Morocco, its cheekbones sharp enough to carve the air, its eyes dark with no spark.

Myka opened her duffel, took out the paper bag that she had not touched, through all of those fourteen travel hours. “Manny would’ve wanted me to give this to you,” she said. “If he saw you.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

At the table in Helena’s kitchen, they shared the bag’s contents: a honey-mustard chicken sandwich, several strips of homemade beef jerky, and an apple. Three oatmeal cookies rounded out the strange breakfast, which, Myka was sure, had started its life intended to be Manny’s lunch. “He thinks he’s no good at baking,” Myka said, after she and Helena had each eaten a cookie.

“I disagree,” Helena said, and Myka handed her the third. Helena ate it fast, like an animal. Like she was afraid it would be taken away.

“Alicia and I do too,” Myka said. She watched Helena pick up the now-empty paper bag with spindly, spider-leg fingers and fold it flat. “I’ll leave if that’s what you want. If you really can’t do this. Because of what happened, or any other reason.”

“ _This_ isn’t what I can’t do. Well. Most likely it is, also, but it wasn’t what I meant.”

“Feel like telling me what?” Myka asked.

Helena sighed. “Can’t do, couldn’t do. Shouldn’t have done: look forward to this day. Of all days. I was hungering for your presence, _wanting_ this day. But how could I? And then there was the possibility that you wouldn’t come. That you would decide _you_ couldn’t.”

“Alicia said she was going to make Manny pitch me halfway here. I guess he sort of did that.”

Helena didn’t say anything.

“Wanting this day. I understand: that’s you betraying her. So you set me up to not show up, and I understand that too, so I could betray you, instead of you betraying her.” Myka wanted to add, with sarcasm, _pretty high opinion of me you’ve got there_ , but she had no right to make that kind of accusation.

Helena still didn’t say anything.

“You should have told me. Yes, I should’ve figured it out sooner—a lot sooner. But you should have told me, so I wouldn’t have had to.”

“I couldn’t. Not on the telephone.” Right. _I didn’t want to mediate it_ , she had said, of showing up in Colorado rather than using the phone. “And I thought—I suppose I did think I was better. Better _able_. To. Given even more time and therapy since a year ago, I thought. And a year ago, it wasn’t good, but it was better than this.”

“But a year ago you weren’t looking forward to it. To the day.” Helena dropped her head, and Myka said, to that hung head, “I don’t want to hurt you like this. Or make you hurt yourself like this. I’ll leave and come back tomorrow.” Then she added, “Or never, if that’s what you need,” because she would have to accept that. Front-stoop declaration aside, she would have to, and would, accept it. If that was what Helena needed, she would go back to Colorado and take herself apart, take out all the pieces that were coming to rely on Helena, and sell them for scrap.

Helena said, “Don’t be sweet to me. I was so cruel to you. Don’t be kind.”

“Right now it’s hard not to be. You’re an animal, and you’re starving and in pain. We all have instincts. We hand over our oatmeal cookies.” That got her no change in facial expression at all, as if all the dates on the calendar, the ones between those days in Morocco and now, had not passed at all. “Why’d you open the door?”

“What?”

“You didn’t have to open the door. I would’ve gone away eventually.”

Helena sat silent for a moment. Then she said, “Some instinct for self-preservation, I suppose. And I did feel, as a new weight, that there was only a door between us, rather than an ocean as usual.”

“And most of a continent.”

“And most of a continent,” Helena said.

Three or four days’ worth of newspapers sat in a haphazard pile at one corner of the table. Myka began aligning their corners, edges. “Why didn’t Leena check up on you?” she asked.

“She’s seeing to some business in France.”

“I would think she’d want to make sure you were okay. Today.”

“I told her I would be fine.”

“Were you lying?”

Helena grimaced. “No more than I was to you, when I said that you should buy a plane ticket.”

“She and I really need to coordinate. Make sure somebody’s around to bring you oatmeal cookies. Or maybe Manny can just throw them at you; he’s still got that arm.” Across most of a continent, and an ocean. “A table,” she said, as she squared the last section of newsprint. It wasn’t very satisfying.

“A table what?” Helena asked.

“Is between us. Will you let me fix that? You can say no. Today or any day, you can say yes or you can say no. It isn’t a test.”

“I’m so selfish.”

Everybody is, Myka might have told her. We’re animals, and we want to stop the pain. We have some weird ways of trying to—but that’s what we want. And in the end, whatever we do, it’s almost always going to be some betrayal. Somebody. Something.

What Myka did tell her was, “That doesn’t really answer my question.”

A slight eyebrow. “I thought it wasn’t a test.”

“Maybe of listening comprehension.”

“I’m selfish _and_ tired,” Helena said, and was that the beginning of a smile?

“Me too. Both those things. That’s a long trip from Colorado.”

“Did you get no sleep at all? That’s my selfish fault as well.”

“Not just you. I was thinking about a car.”

And that was what got her a real smile at last. “Of course you were,” Helena said.

Myka stayed for her scheduled five days, but those days weren’t easy. That might have been entirely due to the near-disaster of the beginning. Then again something else might always have been lurking that would have tripped them up, no matter the date on the calendar. They had easy moments—a conversation would click perfectly, a touch would glide into silken intimacy—but they seemed at other times to be trying to grope their way backward to some version of tenderness they had felt before. Backward, not forward.

At the airport, at the end of those uneasy five days, they couldn’t seem to get the goodbye right. They couldn’t even get the goodbye _kiss_ right. It was all bad aim and mismatched intentions.

Myka said a rueful “I keep telling you I’m terrible at everything but fixing cars.”

Helena frowned. “You are fishing for compliments,” she said. But then she quirked the corners of her lips upward. “Again.”

One little smile, one small word, and then they were getting a kiss, one only disguised as goodbye, very very right.

“We don’t start well, do we,” Myka said. “Ever.”

Helena shrugged. “We finish all right. I’d rather that than the reverse.”

“You know what I think the real problem was, this time?”

That made Helena’s smile fade. “I have a guess.”

“You’d be wrong.”

“All right, then. Tell me your theory.”

“We didn’t watch any sunsets. Five whole days and no sunsets.” Myka shook her head. “I don’t even know who we are anymore.”

That yielded yet another small smile, which in turn led to yet another embrace, one that didn’t bother pretending to be anything other than itself.

Myka eventually boarded a plane. But she and Helena never did quite get the goodbye right.

****

Myka has particularly liked to take this walk, this year, and not just because of the way her footsteps create a path to tranquility. She’s liked to take it because every night, Helena has followed those footsteps and met Myka at the end of them, often in the moonshadow of a dune.

“Assure me you asked no one for sunscreen,” Helena had said, the first night.

And Myka told her, “I am your property.”

Helena had made very clear how much she appreciated that. “My property tastes like sand,” she breathed into Myka’s mouth.

They leaned together against the dune’s concave slip face, against the cool top layer of sand, its heat already stolen back by the setting of the sun.

Tonight, Myka says, “Essaouira tomorrow.” Helena nods against her, a bit of grit and grate, sandy skin on sandy skin. Myka can’t see the difference between Helena’s arms, in the dusk, but she can feel it in their temperature: the radiant heat of the burnt left; the soft mineral cool of the right. “Are you ready for this to be over?”

“It’s been… intense.” Helena’s hands have found a strip of velcro on Myka’s vest, and now a slight, sharp rip, rip, rip echoes in the sliver of space between their bodies. Myka feels the press, just below her sternum, preceding each rip. Helena goes on, “But yes. I’m ready.”

“And has it given you what you wanted? What you needed?”

“I think so.”

****

Myka had not realized how much she had wanted—maybe even needed—to see Driss again, but to be reunited with him was a small miracle in itself.

The first story that tumbled out of him, as they sat in the truck together, had to do with his recent acquisition of Nike basketball shoes: “Airjordan!” he exclaimed, as if it really were just one word, and then, similarly, “Oldschool!” The second story (and that it came second made Myka laugh, then sigh) concerned the fact that he had fallen in love, but the family of the object of his affections happened to be unimpressed with the idea of a son-in-law with grease and oil under his fingernails, and so he and his intended would have to elope if there was to be any hope for their destined-to-be-epic romance, but her father seemed a vengeful sort, so they would need to elope to the very moon! And stay there! Myka told him there was a garage in Colorado—slightly closer than the moon, but probably beyond a vengeful father’s reach—where she could put in a good word for him, given that she owned the place.

She’d thought she was joking with him, but instead of laughing, he blinked at her. In disbelief? “Je suis propriétaire,” she assured him. “Vraiment!” _I am the owner_. _Really!_

It became clear that he had never seriously considered eloping to any place other than the moon—and possibly that he had not seriously considered eloping, or even marrying, at all. Yet he did with great seriousness begin practicing his extremely poor English on Myka and interrogating her about every aspect of life in the United States. The hip-hop is very good, she found herself assuring him in response to his anxious query, though she knew nothing of the sort.

“It, is, oldschool?” he asked, like she might be able to tell him there really was a Santa Claus after all.

She was pretty sure Alicia and Manny didn’t know or care much more about hip-hop than she herself did. She was also pretty sure that if Driss did come to the States, everyone was likely to receive a lot of education about a lot of things.

When Myka and Driss received a call for assistance, on the second day of the first two-day leg, Myka didn’t think anything of it; Driss was the one who said, “Peut-être ton p’tit fantôme et sa belle amie, comme l’autre fois?” _Maybe your little ghost and her beautiful friend, like the other time?_

Myka noted that he probably shouldn’t be attending quite so closely to other women’s beauty, given that he was involved in a destined-to-be-epic romance. He squinted at her and pointed out that Myka’s little ghost and that little ghost’s friend were in fact very beautiful, and how did romance affect the factual elements of this situation or any other?

She conceded the point.

The picture that greeted them as they approached the vehicle in distress was uncanny in its similarity to the one from two years ago—this black woman and this white woman, sitting in the sand, on the shade side of their 4x4. Time doesn’t move backward, Myka had to remind herself. There was a slight difference in that this time, a flat tire marred the visual. It was the only thing that did, for Driss was correct about the factual elements of this situation: Helena and Leena were, in fact, very beautiful.

“I’m just as glad you didn’t blow a shock again, even for the symmetry,” Myka called to Helena, “because I’d prefer the both of you stay in one piece. But how’d you manage to engineer it so we were closest?”

“Completely by chance,” Helena said. She smiled as Myka neared her, and there could have been no more acute a reminder that time did move in only one direction.

Myka said “I don’t believe you,” but she kissed Helena anyway. Driss made a high little ululation, clearly his version of a wolf-whistle. Myka told him, “Regardes la voiture, mec.” _Look at the car_ —and she was unsure what she meant in English with that “mec.” Something like “you big-hearted oversharer.”

“Cette voiture-là? Pfft, ennuyeuse,” he said. _The car there? Boring._

“Hm,” said Leena, “mais que penses-tu d’elles?” _But what do you think of them?_ She waved her hands at Myka and Helena.

Driss nodded. “Interessantes. Très interessantes.” _Interesting. Very interesting._ Then, as if he were a film director, he called out, “Mais un peu de modestie s’il vous plaît! Sinon ce spectacle donnera à ce timide marocain une crise cardiaque!” _But a little modesty, please! Otherwise this spectacle will give this shy Moroccan a heart attack!_

Leena was at pains to explain that this spectacle did not even qualify as a spectacle where these two were concerned. Driss promptly faked a heart attack. Then he winked at Myka, a big-hearted _I’ll deal with the tire, Romeo_ wink.

“It’s probably good that they both feel like they can make jokes,” Myka said to Helena.

“Probably. I suppose you should be pleased she isn’t talking about your machete. I’m not sure Driss would fully appreciate the humor.”

It was true that it was now a joke: when Leena had joined Myka and Helena in Tangier, right before the driving teams were to claim their vehicles, Myka had said to Leena, as her first words after hello, “Now don’t disappoint me,” and Leena had known precisely what her own line was: “Did you bring your machete?”

“It isn’t a machete,” Myka said. A sentence she had certainly never expected to utter with a grin on her face.

“Oh well,” Leena said, “I guess I’ll have to find somebody else to track down this stray”—she nodded toward Helena—“when she wanders off into the desert.”

“Don’t you dare,” both Myka and Helena had said.

****

Tonight, Myka and Helena walk back together. Driss is waiting, and he gives Myka his customary tch-tch chide. “Les camions nous attendent.” _The trucks are waiting for us_. Then he says to Helena, “Ça va, petit fantôme?”

“Je suis fatiguée,” Helena tells him. “De conduire.” _I’m tired. Of driving_.

“Mais demain, aaaahh,” he says. “Demain la mer.” _Tomorrow the sea_.

****

They had met in Tangier, she and Helena, a day before the vehicles arrived. Because, Helena had said, when would Myka be inclined to go to Morocco again?

“Maybe every year again,” Myka had countered. “You don’t know.”

“Nor do you.”

So a day early, they went to the Fondouk Chejra, as Myka had never had time to do. They watched the weavers—rather, Helena watched the weavers. Myka watched Helena watch them: her slight twitch at each clack of the pedal that separated the threads of the warp, her little nostril-flare of an inhalation when the man on one side of the loom would slide-toss the spool of wool through those threads. The way her hands echoed, with barely perceptible finger movements, each catch of the spool by the man on the other side. And back again the other way, and back again: clack, toss, catch; clack, toss, catch; over and over, faster and faster.

Helena had stood here a year ago, most likely watching just like this, her body reacting involuntarily just like this, all these precious movements wasted, unobserved, as Myka waited for her under the hoods of cars, all unaware that she was waiting, unable to see beyond the next minute.

Myka said, “I want—” She stopped.

Helena turned away from the weavers. “What do you want?”

“I don’t mean it as a demand.” And she didn’t. Only as a want.

“What do you want?”

As a want, and as a plaint: “To spend more time with you.”

And in response, a dispensation. “I want that too.”

****

Under a truck in a tent city in the middle of the desert, Myka is replacing a broken exhaust hanger. These hangers, nothing more than rubber bands on steroids, play a disproportionately large part in the exhaust system. That system is based around the exhaust manifold, a bulky piece of cast iron whose job is to funnel hot exhaust away from the engine and into the pipes that convey it out of the car. The pipes are held up by the exhaust hangers—but if the hangers break, then the manifold has to support the entire system. And cast iron is strong and long-lasting, but it’s also very, very heavy. The manifold can barely hold up its own weight; give it more responsibility, and it will begin to crack.

As the cracks widen, the noises start. At first nothing more than clicks and whistles, little sounds that might be anything. Easy to ignore. Easy, for a while, to tolerate, even as those little sounds begin to gather together, to gain volume, to clamor for attention, but at last even accustomed ears have no choice but to recognize the roar for what it is: a herald of catastrophic failure.

Myka executes this small fix—broken rubber donut off, new one on. It rescues the manifold, but it’s only a temporary save. Heat will get it in the end, or rather, heat cycles will. Heat, cool, heat, cool, expand and contract. Everything that expands and contracts will eventually, inevitably break.

It might happen today; it might happen tomorrow. It’s impossible to know. Might as well stay on the road till it does.

****

When Helena had said, during a telephone conversation not long after Myka’s London trip, “What about the Gazelles,” Myka had responded, “What about them? I thought we decided they’re mythical.”

Helena exhaled; it might have been the start of a laugh. Then she asked, “Would you go back?”

“Back? You mean back to working it every year?”

“Not necessarily every year. Just this next one.”

“You want me to go back to fixing cars in the desert.”

“Just for a little while.”

“Would you be driving around in that same desert?” Myka asked, with skepticism.

“Well. Yes.”

“But why? You didn’t seem to like it that much the first time. Even aside from the circumstances.”

“Well, Leena did, and I know she wants to try navigating it once more. But there is another reason.”

“Is there?” She had no idea what Helena was heading for.

“It’s what you said: we don’t start well.” Helena paused. “So I would like some closure.”

“Closure of what?” Myka asked, with rising panic, because if that were the end it would not be the least damaging, not at all, and Myka could feel that damage taking hold, right in her office, her phone at her ear. How could Helena say this kind of thing over the phone? Helena was hardly happy to say _hello_ over the phone, so how could she—

Helena’s voice, its warmest version, took away all that panic: took it right away and replaced it with hope, as she said two very simple words: “The beginning.”

****

What can anyone give you that you don’t already have?

These lists. These lists, these things, and purposeful time to apprehend them.

Moroccan hip-hop artists that an auto mechanic considers oldschool.  
The polishes, paints, and protections that may be applied to fingernails.  
Statistics of minor-league pitchers. (Two no-hitters, pre–rotator cuff.)  
Techniques of navigation, and its oldest tools: moon, stars, sun.  
The setting of that sun.  
A scarf woven from all the colors of Essaouira.  
One imperfectly tied knot.  
A beginning, and that beginning’s end.  
The verb connecting I and you.

Tomorrow, the sea.

END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 6 tumblr tags: you know what took me the longest to write?, the description of the exhaust system, and it's still not quite right, anyway Myka's trip was always going to be the largest set piece, but it refused for a while to come into correct focus, there was e.g. a version that included violence, and while I don't think that was entirely wrong, it wasn't entirely right either, and even if this version isn't entirely right, I think it's righter, thanks for indulging my attempt at this thing, in conclusion, I have listened to a lot of Moroccan hip hop


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